Locarno Pro Panel: Power, People, Data Order Debate

The film industry’s relationship with data is a messy, complicated affair - and nowhere was that friction more visible than at Locarno Pro’s latest industry panel, where a group of producers, distributors, and tech strategists spent a lively hour trying to decide who actually runs the show: the people making the movies, the audiences watching them, or the algorithms quietly shaping both.

The session, titled to provoke rather than settle, drew a packed room of industry professionals still navigating a post-streaming landscape. But instead of a unified vision, the conversation fractured along predictable yet telling lines. The central question - whether data serves creative decision-making or has quietly become its master - produced answers that ranged from confident pragmatism to outright resistance.

One camp argued that data is simply the modern equivalent of a well-read studio executive: a tool for reducing risk in a business where a single release can make or break a production house. For this group, audience metrics, watch-time patterns, and demographic breakdowns are not creative constraints but a form of financial literacy. They pointed to the rise of targeted marketing and the ability to track a film’s cultural footprint in real time as evidence that data, when used well, empowers filmmakers to find their audiences more efficiently than ever before.

Yet an equally vocal group pushed back, warning that the industry has crossed a dangerous line. Their argument was not about efficiency but about agency. When a platform decides a project deserves green-lighting based on a predictive model, the filmmaking process itself changes - not just in terms of financing, but in terms of storytelling. They described a creeping homogenization, where scripts are workshopped against engagement algorithms and casting decisions are made by test audiences rather than directors. For these panelists, the order matters deeply: people should be first, stories second, and data a distant third.

The tension reached its peak during a discussion of the so-called “mid-budget crisis.” Several independent producers in the audience nodded vigorously as a panelist described the near-impossibility of financing a film that does not fit neatly into an existing content category. Algorithms reward the recognizable, they argued, which pushes risk-taking to the margins. The result, they said, is an industry where the unconventional is forced into increasingly narrow release windows, and the idea of a sleeper hit that grows by word-of-mouth feels like a relic of a pre-digital era.

What made the panel particularly sharp was the absence of a comfortable consensus. A distributor on the panel offered a middle path, suggesting that data and creative instinct are not mutually exclusive - but only if the industry redefines what it measures. He proposed that the real challenge is not gathering more data but asking better questions of it: not just “who will watch this?” but “why will they care?” That distinction, he suggested, could separate data as a mirror from data as a cage.

The conversation also touched on the role of the audience itself, and here the panel found rare common ground. Most agreed that the industry’s current obsession with engagement metrics has created a feedback loop that can distort perception. A film that performs well in the first two weeks is often treated as a success, while a film that builds slowly is deemed a failure - even if its long-term cultural resonance is far greater. One panelist likened it to judging a novel by its opening chapter’s click-through rate.

There was also a tangible concern for the next generation of filmmakers. Emerging talent, one participant noted, is already adapting to a landscape where social proof and pre-release hype can matter as much as craft. That adaptation, they argued, is not inherently bad - but it does require a critical awareness that many young directors are never taught. The panel ended with a call for more industry education around data literacy, not so that filmmakers can become slaves to metrics, but so they can understand them well enough to know when to ignore them.

If there was a single takeaway from the afternoon, it was that the question posed by the panel’s title remains intentionally unresolved. Power, people, data - the order shifts depending on who is speaking, and that is precisely the problem. The industry is no longer debating whether data will play a role in how films are made and marketed; that battle is over. The real fight is over what happens next: whether data will be a collaborator, a crutch, or a replacement for the very instincts that made cinema an art form in the first place.

For now, the answer seems to depend on who you ask - and perhaps, as one panelist wryly noted, on whatever the algorithm predicted you would want to hear.

Source: Hollywood Reporter