Can AI understand complex movie plots from video?

Existing video question-answering systems handle simple factual queries but stumble when asked to track characters, motivations, and plot arcs over hours of content. Researchers built StoryVideoQA—363K automatically-generated QA pairs spanning TV shows and feature films up to 2 hours long—and benchmarked 20 leading models, showing they lose coherence tracking storylines. They propose PlotTree, which reorganizes video into hierarchical plot summaries to reason about complex narratives more reliably.