GoKawiilis a reporter focusing on film, TV, and pop culture. Before The Verge, he wrote about comic books, labor, race, and more at io9 and Gizmodo for almost five years.
When Quilty hit the industry trades earlier this year, the AI startup promised that its tool could accurately predict a film’s success just by reading the script. When people actually got a chance to experiment with Quilty’s product, though, they were left skeptical. Even with all the available data in the world, it predicted the script for Christy, which would go on to be a box office flop, would outperform the script for Sinners, which became an Oscar-winning blockbuster.
As many AI execs have pitched before, Quilty’s founders believe that can help “democratize” their industry by giving up-and-coming creatives access to assistive tools — a great Quilty score, perhaps, could be an in with a producer, and a low score might be a sign more revisions are needed. But right now, Quilty is little more than a jumbled mishmash of preexisting AI systems, and the company has yet to prove out that its technology has the taste or analytical abilities to identify a future hit (let alone a proven one).
Founded by film producers Simon Horsman and Daniel Wood, Quilty uses AI to analyze scripts and generate detailed reports about a project’s chances for success. After being fed an unproduced script, Quilty’s tech gives it a score ranging from 0 to 100 that reflects the quality of the would-be project’s narrative, its commercial viability, whether it will resonate with audiences, and how much the production would likely cost. The platform is selling the idea that it can give users a glimpse into the future as they try to get their films / movies greenlit. Horsman and Wood believe that Quilty is poised to become an integral part of how traditional production studios do business.
When I recently sat down with Horsman and Wood, they were adamant about wanting to “keep humans in the loop” rather than fully automating the pre-production process. While first establishing their company, Horsman and Wood solicited feedback from a number of other creatives who often voiced concerns about gen AI’s potential to negatively impact jobs and leave human workers deskilled.
“We agree with a lot of the negative sentiment towards AI, but what we’re trying to do is enable human creativity,” Horsman told me. “Quilty is really about development and giving the users — be they a writer, producer, buyer, financier, or studio execs — as much information as possible to make an informed green light decision.”
Instead of offering users access to a single, bespoke AI model that gives feedback on scripts, Quilty combines a number of widely available AI tools to bring different kinds of analyses to the process. All users have to do is upload their text scripts to the platform, and a few minutes later, it spits out a report that details things like an estimated budget, outlines of important story beats, and character analyses. The service costs $50 per individual analysis, but you can also purchase multiple analyses at a discounted rate.
The idea for this kind of piecemeal analytical workflow first came to Wood — who also serves as Quilty’s CTO — a few years back when he was being sued over a real estate matter. Rather than spending money on an attorney, Wood fired up ChatGPT, which promptly told him “I’m not a lawyer; go find someone else to help you.”
“Then I went to Gemini, which worked a lot better for a while, because I had a larger context window,” Wood recounted. “But then I was on X, and saw stupid Elon Musk talking about Grok getting the best lawyer score ever for an AI model, and I was like, ‘Let me check that out.’” (Wood did not detail how that legal dispute worked out.)
“When Claude Mythos comes out, all of a sudden, my whole software gets better”
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