Quilty AI Scores Low-Budget Sweeney Drama Higher Than Big-Budget Blockbuster Sinners, Citing Star Power and Costs

Quilty, an AI startup founded by film producers Simon Horsman and Daniel Wood, assigned a higher score to the script for Christy than to the script for Sinners. Christy grossed around $2 million at the box office. Sinners grossed $370 million and became an Oscar-winning blockbuster.

Quilty generates a score from 0 to 100 for each script based on narrative quality, commercial viability, audience resonance, and likely production cost. The service costs $50 per individual analysis. The Verge reported on the company’s performance on June 5, 2026.

Horsman and Wood said the higher score for Christy reflected Sydney Sweeney’s popularity and the lower production cost of biographical boxing dramas compared with fantasy and action films such as Sinners. They cited Revenge of the Nerds as a film that would receive a lower score today because it depicts sexual assault in a comedic light. Quilty does not train its own models.

U.S. servers for financial modeling, and a combination of Claude and ChatGPT for narrative and character analysis. The company incorporates VADER sentiment analysis and relies on context prompting to limit hallucinations.

Daniel Wood, who serves as Quilty’s CTO, said the modular approach allows the platform to adopt improved models as they become available. “When Claude Mythos comes out and I can see that it’s a better LLM, all of a sudden, my whole software gets better,” Wood said. Simon Horsman said the goal is to keep humans in the loop.

“We agree with a lot of the negative sentiment towards AI, but what we’re trying to do is enable human creativity,” Horsman told The Verge. ” Horsman produced the film Magazine Dreams, which was derailed by actor Jonathan Majors’ high-profile fall from grace in 2023. Wood said he first experimented with consumer AI tools while handling a real-estate lawsuit several years ago.