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. “This is an important, original, and compelling book. To my knowledge, it is the first sociological analysis of Hollywood’s recent transformation with the arrival of streaming platforms and the advent of data specialists. It will change how we think about movie making.”— Angèle Christin, author of Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms “This is a momentous contribution to the field of cinema and media studies and is destined to be received as a landmark text that represents the very finest traditions of critically informed fieldwork and interpretation in media industry studies.”— Michael Curtin, author of Playing to the World’s Biggest Audience: The Globalization of Chinese Film and TV “Zeroing in on how ‘datafication’ fuels media's current streaming disruption, this tour de force goes inside streaming’s major corporations. Roussel achieves what few other scholars are trained for or capable of: she unpacks both the human dimension of algorithms in media creation and the internal cross-cultural tensions in production work that trade-talk glosses over to echo board-room hype.”— John Thornton Caldwell, author of Specworld: Folds, Faults, and Fractures in Creator Industries 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.