CinePulse: Pre-Release Audience Satisfaction Prediction for South Asian Cinema

Pre-release prediction of audience satisfaction in South Asian cinema is hindered by diverse audience demographics, systematic platform bias and the absence of structured frameworks for analyzing promotional content. This paper presents CinePulse — a five-stage pipeline that classifies YouTube comments from pre-release promotional videos into eight audience persona segments and applies a persona-weighted gap formula to predict satisfaction scores before theatrical release. The gap formula measures alignment between promotional content signals and segment-specific audience expectations, producing scores directly comparable to verified post-release platform ratings. CinePulse was validated on eleven South Asian films spanning Hindi, Telugu, Marathi and Tamil cinema across three development phases. Prospective predictions for six films were published at cinepulseai.com before theatrical release and independently archived via the Wayback Machine. The system achieved a mean absolute error of 5.1 points across nine verified films, and 3.9 points excluding the Bhooth Bangla nostalgia inflation outlier. CinePulse demonstrates that persona-segmented gap analysis of YouTube promotional content provides actionable pre-release audience intelligence for producers, distributors and OTT platforms across multiple South Asian film languages and markets.