At some point during most pitches for independent films, someone says, “I just think people will love it.” You might have said that after watching a few too many movies that changed someone’s life late at night for no good reason. That pitch has both brought people jobs and sunk budgets. But there is a quiet change going on in Australia’s independent film world. It has less to do with gut feelings and more to do with facts.
Since the Producer Offset was introduced and Screen Australia was founded almost twenty years ago, the number of movies made in Australia has more than doubled.
There are more movies being made than ever before. But in the same time period, average attendance and box office sales for each Australian film have dropped by more than half. The math doesn’t look good for the way things are now. More work, but fewer eyes on each title. Even though the gap is awkward, it has led more and more independent filmmakers to trust their guts and look for tools that can help them read the room before it even gets full.
Companies that predict how well movies will do at the box office, like Gower Street Analytics, already work with studios to make predictions for movies that are already set to come out. Independent Australian filmmakers, on the other hand, have much smaller budgets and almost no studio safety net. As a result, they are turning more and more to persuasive technology tools that they make themselves. These include AI-assisted audience sentiment analysis and behavioral data platforms that keep an eye on what kinds of stories are really getting people to interact online and what’s just making noise on social media for the weekend.
The difference is more important than it looks. Australia’s movie theaters made $119 million in May alone, which was 26% more than the previous high point set in 2019. During the month, almost one in four online Australians aged 14 and up visited a movie theater chain’s website. It’s clear that people are still coming. Independent filmmakers want to know which stories people will actually pay to see and if technology can help them narrow that down before they spend money on production.
It seems like the smartest professionals aren’t relying on these tools instead of their own creative judgment. It’s being put through its paces with them. The first DISRUPT AI Film Festival in Australia produced some interesting research about how AI affects the quality of filmmaking. Researchers from Swinburne, RMIT, and Deakin universities looked at 371 submissions and discovered that the best films weren’t made by people who had the best prompts or the most expensive tools. They were made by people who had a clearer vision, a stronger goal, and were ready to try again and again. It turned out that as technology got easier to use, experience got more valuable, not less.
That finding has effects that go beyond the festival circuit. Independent filmmakers can now more easily use persuasive technology to model their audiences. The question is whether these filmmakers are creative enough to act on what the data tells them. It’s one thing to know that horror and comedy do better than drama at the Australian box office in terms of number of admissions. To make a scary movie that really hits home, like Danny and Michael Philippou’s Talk to Me, which went from its premiere at the Adelaide Film Festival to making $140 million worldwide on its A24 release, you need something that an algorithm can’t make.
In 2024–25, Australia’s screen industry spent AUD2.7 billion on drama production, which is 43% more than the previous year. The value of international goods has almost tripled. That momentum is real, and investors and co-production partners who know more and more about what they want to back are paying attention. Independent Australian filmmakers who know who watches what, when, on what platforms, and why are finding that they have more credibility in places that didn’t allow them before.
It’s still not clear if persuasive technology will ever be able to reliably predict a big hit. Based on the history of movies, it’s likely not entirely. Still, it might be just as helpful to help independent filmmakers make a strong case for the movies they already believe in and find the viewers those movies deserve.
