In Hollywood, AI becomes the secret weapons of agents to negotiate the fees
Hollywood agents are now turning to artificial intelligence to measure the real impact of their stars online. Objective: to transform the buzz into tangible data and to negotiate better with the studios. A trend that questions talent in the face of figures on site.
For decades, the value of an actor was measured at the box office or in television audiences (Médiamétrie in France, Nielsen in the USA). But the era of streaming has scrambled the cards: the platforms now keep their data under key, complicating negotiations for a suite or a new season. Result: the agents turn to a new weapon to assess the real impact of their customers: artificial intelligence.
Variety reveals in a recent survey that these tools – Grok, Chatgpt, or those developed by Facebook and Anthropic – are capable of scrutinizing in real time social networks, articles and criticisms to provide precise data on the place occupied by a star in public conversation. What transform a simple “buzz” into a solid contractual argument.
The most striking example came this summer from the film this summer Heads of StateAction Comedy launched on Prime Video, with Idris Elba and John Cena featured. Officially, the two headliners are the English actor and the American actor, who embody the heads of state of the title. Except that an analysis controlled by the Priyanka Chopra Jonas team has shown that the actress-however “third role” of the film-concentrated between 50 and 60 % of online discussions, twice as much as her male co-stars. Which makes Anjula Acharia, manager of Chopra from the tech world say, that these figures change the situation: “I do not think that it would have been assigned the merit usually, because it is not a “head of state” in the film. But this time, the data does not lie “ she said in Variety. Between the lines, we understand that it intends to use these data noted by the AI to negotiate the stamps of its actress in the future.
A way to restore power to talents in negotiations with studios, thanks to AI, in order to rebalance the balance of power. The tool makes it possible to transform what was intuition or feeling into tangible data: which generates the most buzz? Who is really highlighted in criticism? Who shares extracts on the networks?
But the terrain is slippery. Because the data can be biased by groups of hyperactive fans, capable of orchestrating a maximum of noise on the canvas (Zack Snyder has won an Oscar like that). Even by a very connected national market capable of artificially crushing the conversation, as was the case for Priyanka Chopra Jonas, who has largely benefited – in the case of Head of State – its immense popularity in India (the country has 1.5 billion inhabitants). And then the studios already use these tools on their side, and have their own metrics, which is likely to transform the negotiations of the future into a duel of figures, sometimes contradictory, a battle of IA figures against IA figures.
What about artistic value in all of this? Too much to rely on data, Hollywood may ultimately reduce the performance of actresses and actors to a metric of “buzz”, by strengthening a logic of visibility already present in the castings of studios: we know that such a role is more easily given to a star who has a large number of subscribers on Instagram or Tik Tok. When media attention becomes a currency as precious as talent.
