The Arrakis Ledger: Script Trend Forecaster

Inspired by the quest for a precious resource in 'Dune' and the secret, methodical process of 'The Prestige', The Arrakis Ledger is an automated intelligence service for the film industry. In the competitive world of screenwriting, knowing what the market desires is like 'spice'—an invaluable commodity. This project is the 'machine' that secretly mines this data.

Concept:
The service operates on a subscription model, offering different tiers of insight, much like the three acts of a magic trick:
1. The Pledge (Low-Cost/Free Tier): Subscribers receive a weekly automated newsletter summarizing high-level trends. For example: 'This week, Sci-Fi/Horror scripts under 100 pages are receiving the highest ratings.'
2. The Turn (Standard Tier): Paid subscribers get access to a live dashboard. This platform, updated daily by the RPA bot, offers deeper analytics: trending keywords in loglines, popular character archetypes, sentiment analysis on script feedback, and a 'heat index' for specific genre combinations.
3. The Prestige (Premium Tier): Aimed at agents and small production houses, this tier offers bespoke reports. A client could request, 'Generate a report on all scripts featuring 'time travel' that have been downloaded over 500 times in the last quarter.' The bot would perform a custom run to gather and analyze this specific data.

How It Works (The RPA Engine):
An individual developer uses a low-cost or free RPA platform (like UiPath Community Edition or Robot Framework) to build and deploy a bot. The bot's core function is to automate a repetitive, rule-based process:
1. Login & Navigate: The bot logs into various public screenplay repositories and online 'Black List' style websites.
2. Scrape Data: It systematically extracts metadata from new and trending scripts, including genre, logline, page count, user ratings, download counts, and reader comments.
3. Aggregate & Clean: The raw data is automatically fed into a low-cost database (like Google Sheets or Airtable). The bot performs data cleansing tasks, such as standardizing genre tags (e.g., changing 'sci-fi' and 'science-fiction' to a single standard).
4. Analyze & Report: The bot triggers simple scripts or uses database formulas to perform analysis. The results are then used to automatically populate the web dashboard, compile the weekly email newsletter using a service like Mailchimp, and generate custom PDF reports for premium clients.

This project is niche, requires minimal initial investment, can be run by a single person, and has high earning potential by selling valuable, hard-to-obtain industry insights as a service.