Hollywood's actual crisis isn't streaming competition. It's the industry's resistance to data-driven decision-making, argues Tobias Queisser, CEO of Cinelytic Group, in a guest column for TheWrap.
Queisser positions technological literacy as the real competitive advantage studios need. While executives obsess over Netflix's market dominance, the deeper problem sits internal. Traditional film and TV companies still rely on gut instinct, decades-old precedent, and executive intuition rather than leveraging analytics to forecast project viability, audience behavior, and market trends.
Cinelytic develops predictive tools that analyze scripts, budgets, talent attachments, and release windows to model financial outcomes. The company's software represents exactly what Queisser argues the industry must adopt. Studios spending $100 million to $300 million on tentpole projects still greenlight films without sophisticated modeling of comparable titles, audience demographics, or platform-specific performance data.
The column frames this as existential. Streaming platforms succeed partly because they weaponize data at every stage. Netflix analyzes viewing patterns, completion rates, and demographic overlap to greenlight content. Amazon, Disney Plus, and Apple TV Plus employ similar methodologies. Legacy studios, meanwhile, operate with institutional inertia. Producers, agents, and executives who built careers on relationship-driven decision-making resist transparency that numbers provide.
Queisser's argument extends beyond financial forecasting. Data literacy shapes creative decisions. Which scripts get produced. Which talent packages find support. Which international markets get prioritized for theatrical releases. The studios treating these as binary choices rather than probabilistic exercises lose optionality and competitive positioning.
The piece challenges Hollywood's cultural mythology around movie-making as an art form resistant to quantification. Queisser doesn't argue that data eliminates creative risk. He argues that embracing analytics reduces unnecessary business risk,