Not Your Average Joe: Hollywood’s Data Wars offers a history of how film aesthetics and data science came to be entangled long before the materialization of the phrase “Big Data.” From technologies like the social survey, community study, public opinion polling, to algorithmic filtering on contemporary streaming platforms, my project highlights critical moments at which spectatorship turned into data points that could be collected and analyzed. What are the social implications of thinking of film production, distribution, and reception as scientific, and even “statistical,” in nature? My project argues that scientific audience research does not benignly gather information but also reshapes identity categories such as race, gender, and citizenship. Moreover, in contrast to previous scholarship that understands “data collecting” as exclusively a methodological or ideological practice, my project argues that developments in dataification can also be read as an aesthetic paradigm. In other words, data science created a productive space for filmmakers to experiment with novel aesthetic practices, for distributors to employ newspaper “montages,” and for audiences to engage with “counter-storytelling” on digital media. Ultimately, this archeology of data mining bridges conversations in film history and quantitative media theory – all while providing pertinent interrogations of the possibilities and limitations of “Big Data.”