Today’s invention is a new way to index and compare movies. Instead of using subtitles or timings, each scene is labeled by how many dollars-per-screen-second it took to make.
These figures are constantly being monitored by production accountants, so that it would be fairly simple to add these data to the raw movie and then keep track of them during editing.
This would allow people who were fans of the spectacular, or high-price stars, to skip to the most expensive scenes. Student directors could perhaps determine how to tell a story more cheaply.
It may be that the bar chart of spend-per-scene throughout a film is a common characteristic of a given genre -a fingerprint that might be *searched* for by devotees of a particular movie type.
The cost-rate statistics could also be compared with standard audience appreciation metrics for each scene to assess whether spending more is actually correlated with increased entertainment.
It would also provide a new way for candidate directors to be compared before contracts are signed. Allow say two or three to make the same scene and compare their test audience ratings with their respective costs.
