Check out this article in my blog series about the Death of Cinema.

This is from the New York Times page. the article itself is not so revealing of any deep insights: Hollywood is data-analyzing films to predict box-office success. Like Netflix, Facebook or any other interactive service, use and preferences can and will be used for (or against) you. What is worth reading is the set of 300+ comments to this article, showing how many filmmakers hold different views.

Here is one comment, verbatim, the others you should check out yourself.

Pure Snake Oil
When you hire execs who can’t read a script, have no movie, literature, or artistic insight or training, you create a mentality that everything can be measured by meta-data and statistics. The best film experience is an emotional experience, connecting to the heart and soul of an audience. These are not the elements that an algorithm can measure, it’s a measure of humanity itself. It’s art. Why do multimillion dollar projects fail while there was a line around the block to see My Big Fat Greek Wedding? Answer– an emotional connection to the audience. While embracing statistics and algorithms to seek a formula for success and profit, these clueless execs are banking on failure.

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