Cover for The Fourth Act: How Theaters Could Host the Next Era of Storytelling

The Fourth Act: How Theaters Could Host the Next Era of Storytelling

A New Format for AI-Powered, Audience-Directed Cinema

Movie theaters are underused. AI video is expensive. Media companies sit on frozen IP. The Fourth Act reframes all three as a shared opportunity using modular, stylized AI films shaped by live audience input to reinvent cinema as a co-authored experience.

Media InnovationAI & StorytellingInteractive DesignFuture Formats
Published: June 13, 2025
Updated: December 12, 2025
DOIRead Whitepaper

The Approach

Scott Jellen is an independent researcher working at the intersection of protocol design, rights modeling, and interoperability across digital and public systems. His work includes standards-oriented specifications, reference models, and published whitepapers that examine how incentives, governance, and infrastructure can be represented clearly and designed to scale. He is the founder of the Jellen Protocol Lab, which serves as the emerging home for this research. Flagship work includes the Universal Sports Graph (USG), a protocol-based framework spanning RFC-style specifications and a versioned reference registry.

© 2026 Scott Jellen. Licensing varies by publication.