How Disney Plans to Measure Exactly How Much You Like Its Movies

It can be hard to predict which films will triumph at the box office and which will completely bomb. Just ask the people who made the recently released sci-fi thriller Valerian, which cost a shade under $200 million to make--and after one weekend, has made back just $23.5 million in total ticket sales. Perhaps in the future, forecasting audience enjoyment won't be such an inexact science. Disney and the California Institute of Technology have teamed up to build an artificial intelligence system that they say can measure moviegoers' facial reactions to determine just how much they're really liking a film. According to a paper published collaboratively by the two institutions last week and first spotted by Digital Trends, the team of researchers had test audiences watch Disney movies and used an infrared high-definition camera to capture their reactions.