This just makes me wonder if it would be possible for a modern streaming platform to make movies that personalize to a user. There's no fundamental reason you couldn't shoot a movie that plays different versions of a scene to different users.
I think different versions of the same movie would completely break word of mouth, though.
Story branch decisions in gaming are to some extent just an evaluation of what the writer's think of your world view - at least when it comes to consequences. Arguably they can only really be constructed as a trial between two opposing narrative voices - resolve questions of character via the wisdom of the crowd.
Discussion and memes based on movies don't work quite well if everybody is watching a different movie.
Similarly for a movie, perhaps we could personalize them, but would the result actually be desirable.
I'm so surprised that there are memes from big hits, but no real talk about them.
I mean there's relatively a lot of talk about how Harry Potter feels good but doesn't make sense, and of course lots of critiques, reviews, "reaction videos", but somehow it seems actual people stopped talking about movies with each other (beyond the very shallow have you seen it? yes/no. was it good? yes/no.)
maybe I just miss when people talked too much about the Matrix? :D
also I find it strange that it's still so hard to find good movies/books/series/games that I would like.... despite all the data, metadata, taxonomy, folksonomy (tags! unstructured data! big data! bad data, bad!)
for example, IMDB knows what I like, Netflix too, yet the recommendations are pretty bad.
let's take Mindhunter. "CSI done well", right? but I still haven't found something that is similar to it. (not that I looked very much.)