Cineflux: Using AI to scale qualitative film audience research (Book chapter extended abstract)

Extended abstract of a book chapter introducing Cineflux, a hybrid AI framework that places focus-group data and large-scale online reviews into a shared semantic space for like-for-like audience comparison. Uses hierarchical Stochastic Block Modelling (hSBM) for topic extraction and a needle-movement metric to quantify thematic shifts between known demographic segments and general audience reactions. Demonstrated on the Portuguese horror film Amelia's Children (2023) with 2,149 Letterboxd reviews and 1,530 focus-group turns (N = 80). Funded by the European Union (CresCine, grant 101094988).