In a world鈥� where artificial intelligence seems unstoppable, one studio has developed algorithms that can predict what kind of audience will go to see a movie when it is released just by analysing film trailers.
Working out who will find a movie appealing is not an easy task. Film companies get anonymised data on who watches a movie after the fact, but by that point trailers to run alongside it have already been selected.
A team at 20th Century Fox wanted to know whether an automated system could predict who would show up for different films based on the trailer alone. That way they would have a better idea of which trailers to show with a particular film. Would people who watch, Beauty and the Beast, for example, also enjoy The Greatest Showman?
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The team began by breaking hundreds of film trailers into the first 100 frames for analysis. After more than 680,000 frames had been collected, the AI identified features from each, such as faces or objects. This allowed it to learn differences between trailers, which were partly dependent on their respective film genre.
To test the system, they looked at attendance data from 50 recent films. It was able to predict the likelihood of an audience for one film going to see another with around 70 per cent accuracy. Because trailers are wrapped up long before the official release, this means the tool could be used to predict audience behaviour six to eight months before the movie is out.
It isn鈥檛 surprising that people who saw a movie from one genre might go to see another in the same genre 鈥� but the algorithm picked up less intuitive audience correlations too, says at Emory University, who was not involved in the work.
For example, the AI also spotted that many attendees of The Greatest Showman also went to see Hidden Figures, a historical film about African-American women who worked at NASA. Such insight might help studios better design trailers or movies in the future, says Schweidel.
鈥淭hese movies are expensive to produce,鈥� he says. 鈥淚f there鈥檚 anything they can do to make a movie more successful, that鈥檚 a worthwhile investment.鈥�
However, 听听at Staffordshire University says that analysing trailers in the hope of altering promotional campaigns or film content may not always be possible, as marketing strategies are often decided before the film is even made.
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