Hollywood’s major stu­dios are bow­ing before the almighty algorithm

In case you weren’t feel­ing enough apoc­a­lyp­tic despair from last year’s news that a dig­i­tal-imag­ing com­pa­ny would revive James Dean and oth­er deceased stars for com­put­er­ized per­for­mances in new films, Warn­er Bros has come to march us fur­ther into a dystopi­an future.

This week The Hol­ly­wood Reporter broke the news that the stu­dio has signed a con­tract with Cine­lyt­ic, a com­pa­ny offer­ing AI-assist­ed ​“project man­age­ment sys­tems” first made avail­able last year. The item includes a lot of cor­po­rate jar­gon, so suf­fice it to say that the pro­grams ana­lyze and extrap­o­late data from tick­et sales and audi­ence response to inform deci­sion-mak­ing about which movies get the green light and who gets cast in them.

STX has also hitched their wag­on to Cine­lyt­ic in the hopes that this sort of auto­mat­ed con­sult­ing firm can help guide them to their next hit. But the real stan­dard-set­ter here is Net­flix, which has proud­ly tout­ed its almighty, mys­te­ri­ous algo­rithm as a key part of stu­dio pro­to­col since they got into the orig­i­nal con­tent game.

Hav­ing seen all of the Net­flix movies – not exag­ger­at­ing, all of them – I feel unique­ly qual­i­fied to con­fer my unease about this devel­op­ment. The exec­u­tives insist that the changes moti­vat­ed by algo­rith­mic favor will be imper­cep­ti­ble, apart from the vague sen­sa­tion that audi­ences are see­ing more and more of what they want and less of what they don’t. But on a long enough time­line, habit­u­al movie­go­ers will start to sense that something’s off.

In prac­tice, pat­terns even­tu­al­ly emerge and dimin­ish the quo­tient of sur­prise, rev­e­la­tion, and dis­cov­ery. Sim­ply put, if a movie works, you’ll see more movies like it. In the wake of THX’s wind­fall with Hus­tlers, we can be sure they’ll be hunt­ing for more movies about scams, more female-led crime pic­tures, more movies with non-sex­u­al sex appeal. These prac­tices seed homo­gene­ity at a time when orig­i­nal­i­ty and dif­fer­ence are already in short supply.

More to the point, there’s no real evi­dence that tak­ing point­ers from the algo­rithm even works. Because Net­flix doesn’t have to sell tick­ets or report on stream­ing view­er­ship num­bers, and because they can just keep amass­ing debt with­out deliv­er­ing, their suc­cess is an indus­try nar­ra­tive large­ly tak­en on the hon­or sys­tem. But more and more, stu­dios are reshap­ing them­selves in the image of stream­ing any­way, a move that may or may not lack fore­sight, as only time will tell.

There’s a bril­liant moment towards the end of 30 Rock’s run where NBC exec­u­tive Jack Don­aghy final­ly breaks down and accepts that he has no idea how to run a TV net­work, that every aspect of show busi­ness defies log­ic and busi­ness acu­men. He con­cludes that the only real qual­i­fi­ca­tion for the enter­tain­ment sec­tor is a slav­ish devo­tion to media itself, which cre­ates the intu­ition that metas­ta­sizes into the gut feel­ings on which stu­dio boss­es pride themselves.

The absolute truth is that the things that make a movie into a mega hit – things like act­ing and writ­ing and direct­ing – can’t be logged and syn­the­sized by a com­put­er. Quite the oppo­site, actu­al­ly. The dis­tinct­ly human abil­i­ty to rec­og­nize tal­ent brings us thrilling new artists instead of attempt­ed copies of the ones who’ve come before. The bolts of bril­liance arriv­ing out of nowhere; that’s what keeps Hol­ly­wood alive.