Data-Driven Hollywood by Violaine Roussel

Data-Driven Hollywood by Violaine Roussel

The rise of Hollywood’s data and algorithm specialists and their growing influence on creative decisions

In Hollywood today, thousands of data specialists work for streaming video platforms, playing a role not just in distribution and marketing but also in decisions about content and production. In Data-Driven Hollywood, Violaine Roussel examines the emergence of this new category of professionals at the heart of the Hollywood dream factory. Roussel shows how the rise of data and algorithm specialists has transformed organizations and rearranged power relationships within them. Drawing on extensive interviews and in situ observations, she describes the ways that technical “data work” carried out by professionals at streaming platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ has had a significant effect on creative decisions.

Rather than fetishizing data and algorithmic models, Roussel explores the practices of the professionals who shape them, manipulate them, and give them power. She examines the relationships of these workers with traditional producers, describing legitimacy struggles and the eventual stabilization of new professional arrangements. Roussel’s account of the ways that data specialists deploy algorithmic models to reinvent their industry’s approach to content, artists, and the market—the first in-depth sociological study of the rise of this new profession—reveals the new forms of power and knowledge at play in today’s Hollywood.

Violaine Roussel is professor of sociology at the University of Paris 8 and research fellow at the Paris Center for Sociological and Political Research (CRESPPA). She is the author of Representing Talent: Hollywood Agents and the Making of Movies, How to Do Politics with Art, and other books.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780691251417
ISBN 10	069125141X
Title	Data-Driven Hollywood
Author	Violaine Roussel
Series	Princeton Studies In Cultural Sociology
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Princeton University Press
Year published	2026-06-30
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.