Come with me — if you want your script to live.
That could be the message from a growing subset of companies working to harness artificial intelligence and data to help determine the market potential for new Hollywood screenplays, according to a Wall Street investor who recently told Insider he's bullish about windfalls the tech could generate.
"What we're interested in right now are companies that are creating a more automated way of identifying valuable IP," Aria Vossoughi of Serengeti Asset Management told Insider. Vossoughi is head of special situations and revenue finance at Serengeti, a New York-based firm that manages more than $1 billion in assets across both public and private investing strategies. "There's a few companies that are creating a more automated way of identifying valuable IP," he said, without naming specific firms, and added that the space is still "very nascent."
"I have seen your traditional production studios and houses leverage their internal data on a smaller scale," Vossoughi said, "but I'm seeing a few people coming out of those companies saying, 'We should be able to aggregate broad market-level data'" as well as AI and other kinds of tech "to disrupt the space."
The potential disruption comes as private credit investors like Vossoughi pour record amounts of capital into media and sports deals, and artificial intelligence upends every industry in a revolution that Goldman Sachs' chief information officer recently told Insider "feels like one of those two or three really big things that I've ever seen in my life."
Hollywood's AI love affair is heating up
Using historical data to help make informed predictions about which projects are destined to become hits at the box office, and which could fall flat, could spare filmmakers professional embarrassment and reduce investors' financial risk tied to backing new, untested content.
And, although the practical uses for AI in entertainment thus far bear little resemblance to Hollywood doomsday scenarios depicted in films like "The Terminator" or "The Matrix," it's clear that the tech is becoming increasingly hard to avoid.
To be sure, Hollywood has been taking steps toward fusing data, algorithms, and creative content for years. Streamers like Netflix use proprietary in-house algos and analytics to make inferences about what viewers want to see. Some startups have gamified filmmaking by exploring how switching out actors in movie casts could impact their fate at the box office, or leveraged machine learning to evaluate scripts by scanning for hundreds of thousands of attributes, past reports show.
But smaller companies may not have the same tech capabilities of larger studio or streaming players, opening the door to an opportunity.
Other investors like venture capitalists are attracted to the intersection of media and AI. Michael Blank, head of consumer investing at CAA, previously told Insider that investments in this arena are "blowing up right now." Startups using AI and machine learning are providing tools to studios that can generate deepfakes to swap faces on film, reverse age actors, recreate the voices of deceased persons, or expedite the language-dubbing process.
Despite the potential upsides of these tools, it remains to be seen how Hollywood's creative community will greet them as they become more prevalent: either as welcome resources to evaluate the viability of content, or as interlopers trespassing on their artistic turf. Vossoughi says such a viewpoint would be too reductive.
"I don't think it's going to replace the judgment on creativity. It supplements it more than replacing it," he told Insider of AI tech. "I don't think you should ever be losing the human element. If this thing is actually done appropriately, then it should enable a more effective process for analyzing what works versus what doesn't."
Do you work in tech, financing, or creative development in Hollywood? Contact this reporter. Reed Alexander can be reached via email at ralexander@insider.com, or SMS/the encrypted app Signal at (561) 247-5758.
