Filmonomics says they have a system for predicting what is going to win the Oscar — two years from now!

The likelihoods of a movie being Certified Fresh, financially successful and being nominated for Academy Awards, is knowable at the point of development.

It is based on their multi-point analysis of the script, even before the movie goes into production.

To be sure, correlation is not causation; there are many factors that go into making a movie successful at the box office and during awards season. Still, the implications for filmmakers here are obvious: If high Slated Script Scores are tied to both high financial returns and high probability of critical and award success, then making sure your script is as good as possible is the key to attracting top talent, smart money, and experienced distributors, all of which are essential to increase the likelihood of stronger outcomes and more accurate projections (as we painstakingly researched and wrote about in this prior post). That sounds like common sense, but one has only to look at a theater marquee to see how frequently this advice is ignored. And now that tools exists that can predict your project’s outcome, ignoring it is inexcusable. If a submitted screenplay fails to make the grade under this scoring system, then at least those involved have a benchmark from which to make adjustments and return with something more appealing.

It should be self-evident that you can make a bad movie with a good script but you cannot make a good movie with a bad script. And yet, given the economics of global distribution, the studios keep making the script a lower priority.