Quentin Lee, founder and president of Vancouver’s Margin Films (Comedy Invasion, White Frog), remembers how they collected market intelligence in the late 1990s when putting together one of their earliest features as a director/producer, the dramedy Shopping for Fangs. They’d head to the local library branch and devour copies of Variety.

Certainly, the evolution of the internet has given filmmakers a wealth of information and the capacity to analyze it, but there’s still substantial need for specialized help when it comes to market analysis, box office comparables and a host of other areas of intel that are typically the domain of sales agents, distributors or occasionally costly consultants.

Now, rather than pulling up a seat at the local library, Lee pulls up Largo.ai on their desktop. Largo is a Switzerland-based software as a service (SaaS) company geared towards the film, TV and advertising industries that uses AI modelling to analyze and recommend projects’ financial prospects, box office comparables, casting and demographics, among other data points.

In an increasingly algorithm-driven entertainment industry, if content is still king, data holds the keys to the castle. And companies like Largo.ai are becoming attractive resources for producers of all stripes – from indies like Margin Films to major studios such as Lionsgate and Warner Bros. Discovery.

“Once [production companies] go to financiers with all this information, it becomes much more interesting for financiers because they have this risk assessment from all angles,” says Sami Arpa, co-founder and CEO of Largo.ai.

Larger companies and studios have a distinct advantage when it comes to data insights, but indies like Margin are narrowing the gap, largely thanks to a suite of AI or tech-powered solutions geared towards the film and TV production business. Nowadays, Lee uses Largo for financial predictions and box office comparables, ChatGPT to provide script overviews and, on the purely creative side, Midjourney along with Runway to generate promotional material.

Toronto-based filmmaker and producer Sheila Warren, who operates through her shingle SWarren Film (Park 33), has been using Largo since 2022, for use in a range of areas from “genre comparisons to demographics, comparable budgets and incomes.”

In the case of her upcoming sci-fi thriller Impulse Control, Warren notes that Largo’s genre comparisons matched multiple projects she came up with during her own genre analysis.

“It just reaffirmed that my script and the story, the peaks and valleys and the action … is [all] suitable for what I wanted,” she says.

Similarly, L.A.-headquartered SaaS company Cinelytic uses its AI-driven platform to analyze data across the industry and forecast revenues and the best markets for a film’s release along with paths to distribution. The software uses data points such as genre, box office results, VOD transactions, social media responses and the talent involved in the project.

“You can model out a prototype [of] how this film could find an audience and find a path to distribution,” says CEO Tobias Queisser, who co-founded Cinelytic in 2015 with CTO Dev Sen.

Cinelytic’s former clients include Lionsgate and Sony Pictures. However, there are producers who find that the AI approach to data analysis and market insight has some way to go before it’s adaptable for smaller to mid-size prodcos.

“[Sales projections] were all based around bigger budget movies [as opposed to] what most Canadian productions are,” says Dylan Pearce, producer and cofounder of Edmonton-based Northern Gateway Films (A Frosty Affair), of his experience using Largo to augment data received from distributors and sales agents.

“It was useful for insights if you’re at a bigger studio budget, versus where most Canadian films sit,” he says.

Pearce said he’s still working with the company to help develop that data for medium- and indie-budget films, but continues to work with distributors and sales agents to formulate sales projections.

So while AI-powered analytics platforms might not yet be at the “one software fits all” stage, they’re certainly a growing area for investment: Largo.ai recently secured US$7.5 million in its Series A financing round, with Sylvester Stallone among its backers.

“This kind of data is necessary for any investor to come on board,” says Margin Films’ Lee. “What this software does is it levels the playing field with studios.”

This story originally appeared in Playback‘s spring 2025 issue

Image courtesy of Largo.ai