"ScriptBook, founded in 2015 and based in Antwerp, Belgium, has created a tool that analyzes the text of screenplays to produce financial forecasting, or as Azermai grandly puts it, “Our mission is to revolutionize the business of storytelling by using AI to help producers, distributors, sales agents and financiers assess their risk.” ScriptBook users upload a PDF file of a screenplay into the system. About five minutes later they receive a detailed analysis of the project that, among other things: predicts the MPAA rating, analyzes its characters, detecting the protagonists and antagonists; assesses the emotions of each character; predicts the target audience, including gender and race; and, most importantly, makes box office predictions.
6,500 existing scripts
ScriptBook says that when its system indicates a script should be greenlit, it has an 84% success rate. This, said Azermai, is three times greater than the accuracy rate of humans. ScriptBook founder Nadira Azermai said that by analyzing screenplays, ScriptBook retroactively identified as box-office failures 22 out of the 32 Sony movies that lost money in that period, during which Sony released a total of 62 movies.