The input factors are slippery because many of them are not easily quantifiable. Quantifiable factors include past financial performance of films employing particular actors, directors, and other creative personnel; ratios of marketing to production budget, run-time, correlation of scene length distribution with power-law spectra, and various others.
Story factors are almost impossible to quantify reliably. There are some popular story schema like the Hero's Journey, and some pacing guides, like Black Snyder's 'Beat Sheets' that look at the structure of many successful movies to make guesses about the optimum time for story structure - eg if it's an action movie you need a fight scene by minute 15, or the Villain has to be appear within a certain time frame and get x minutes of solo screen time - but those tools are fashion-driven and if anything they contribute to the cookie-cutter approach. Whenever someone produces a better-than-average guide to what makes popular movies tick, it is quickly imitated as widely as possible.
I've written several screenplays and dislike templates, but I don't know in detail what people want to see. When I write or am working on film production I just have to keep playing the story like a movie in my head and and attempt to gauge whether it's sufficiently involving and consistent over time. The bigger the budget, the more conservative production decisions are likely to be, since executives and biased in favor of repeatability.
Story factors are almost impossible to quantify reliably. There are some popular story schema like the Hero's Journey, and some pacing guides, like Black Snyder's 'Beat Sheets' that look at the structure of many successful movies to make guesses about the optimum time for story structure - eg if it's an action movie you need a fight scene by minute 15, or the Villain has to be appear within a certain time frame and get x minutes of solo screen time - but those tools are fashion-driven and if anything they contribute to the cookie-cutter approach. Whenever someone produces a better-than-average guide to what makes popular movies tick, it is quickly imitated as widely as possible.
I've written several screenplays and dislike templates, but I don't know in detail what people want to see. When I write or am working on film production I just have to keep playing the story like a movie in my head and and attempt to gauge whether it's sufficiently involving and consistent over time. The bigger the budget, the more conservative production decisions are likely to be, since executives and biased in favor of repeatability.