Is Cinema Becoming Less and Less Innovative With Time? Using neural network text embedding model to measure cultural innovation

Current discourse reflects a growing skepticism towards contemporary popular culture, specifically the realm of cinema, with an emerging consensus that its creative capacity is on a waning trajectory. This study introduces a novel approach which employs natural language processing techniques and embed- ding methods to measure semantic novelty of cultural items’ descriptions. We apply this methodology to cinema, analyzing plot summaries of over 19,000 movies from the United-States spanning more than a century. Our measure’s robustness is validated through a series of tests, including a fit with a genre- based novelty score, a manual inspection of films identified as highly innovative, and correlations with award recognitions. The application of our Innovation Score reveals a compelling pattern: an increase in the rate of cinematic innovation throughout the 20th century, followed by a stabilization in the rate of innovation in the 21st, despite an ever-growing production of films. Contrary to the often-voiced lament that cinema is losing its innovative edge, our study suggests that the level of innovativeness in cinema is not in decline.