How to Play

Overview

Everyone in your league is playing as their own movie studio creating a release slate for 2025. You'll draft movies drawn from real-world wide releases, building your slate for the winter (January through April), the summer (May through August), and the fall (September through December). As the year progresses, the studios in your league will compete to see who can make the most money. The most profitable studio wins!

Budgets and Profits

The weekend a movie on your slate is released, your studio loses 2.5 times that movie's reported budget. Then, every dollar that movie grosses worldwide is added to your total. For example, if you had Barbie on your slate in 2023, its $145 million budget would have put you $362,500,000 in the hole on opening day. By the end of the year, it had grossed $1,441,769,400 for a profit of $1,079,269,400. Not too shabby.

So why the 2.5 multiplier? Well, a few reasons. For starters, movie studios are known to (allegedly) lie about budgets in public to (allegedly) create the appearance of success… allegedly. Second, reported budgets do not include marketing costs which are a vital part of releasing a movie. Finally, 100% of grosses do not go back into studios' pockets as cuts are taken by theaters, foreign markets, and back-end profit participants. As such, the 2.5 multiplier is often used as a rule of thumb for where a movie becomes profitable. It isn't a perfect rule, but it's the one we're using.

As for where we get our budgets, we tend to use the numbers stated in the trades (Variety, Hollywood Report, Deadline) but in rare cases have to use comps for budgets from comparable films.

The Draft

Before the draft begins, the league owner will set up a priority list. This can be random or manually chosen. When the draft starts, players choose their preferred position in the “snake draft” order based on their priority ranking. Some might want to pick first in round one, while others might prefer picking last in round one (which means they'll pick first in round two).

When someone picks a movie, it's removed from the pool and no one else can select it.

The Hit Pick

The first pick in the draft is your “Hit Pick” for the year. This pick can come from any point in the year and is not restricted to one season. This is your chance to call your shot on what you think may be be the biggest film of the year.

Seasonal Picks

After your hit pick, the draft continues with seasonal picks. Depending on when you join, you will draft movies set to be released in the current or upcoming season. The league owner can decide how many picks you have to make - and we have recommended numbers based on the amount of people in your league.

The Alt Pick

The final pick of the draft is your “Alt Pick.” This is a movie set to be released in the current season that won't count towards your total unless one of your picks is subsequently moved to streaming or next year's calendar. If that happens, your “Alt Pick” moves on to your slate (even if it's already been released) and you immediately pick a new Alt chosen from the still yet-to-be-released movies that season.

If your movie is moved out of the current season but is still scheduled to be released theatrically this year, you have a choice: you can lock in the movie as your first pick in the upcoming season, or you can give it up and return it to the list of available movies. In either case, your Alt Pick slides into your slate for the current season.

The Bomb Pick

The Bomb Pick can be chosen at any point in the draft. Like the Hit Pick, this can come from any point in the release calendar. However, unlike all your other picks, you want this one to lose money. That's because your bomb pick goes on everyone's slate except your own. The goal here is to lose as much money as possible. But be warned, if you accidentally pick a money-maker, you'll help out everyone but yourself.

Future Seasons

After your draft is completed, you can sit back and watch the box office numbers roll in. When the next season approaches, it's time to draft again. Remember, you only draft your Hit and Bomb picks once at the start of the year.

For these seasonal drafts, the league owner has three options for setting the priority order:

• Based on current standings (last place gets first choice of draft position)
• Random order
• Manual order

Just like the first draft, players will choose their preferred draft position when it's their turn in the priority order.

Declaring a Winner...

When the dust settles and 2025 finally comes to a close… Well, actually you might not know your winner yet.

While throughout the year, you can only draft movies that are set to be released in 2025, you continue to collect money for the entirety of your films' theatrical runs. As such, December releases will continue to earn money into the new year. It's ultimately up to you to decide when to declare a winner, but in particularly tight leagues it may be February or March 2025 before you know who has made the most money.

However, a winner – whenever they end up being declared as such – has more fun if there were stakes! That's why we recommend setting terms at the beginning of the year. Some people choose to bet real money on their league while others see bragging rights as more than enough. In our league, we purchased Chris a trophy to commemorate his win in 2024.

...And a Loser

To keep every studio engaged and fighting the whole year, we also recommend having some sort of punishment in place for the player that finishes last. For our four-person league, we make the loser live stream themselves watching a marathon of movies hand-selected by the other three players. The day our 2024 loser Travis had to marathon Star-Wars-job-loser The Book of Henry, animated travesty Foodfight!, and Disney Channel 9/11 original Tiger Cruise was a highlight of all of our years (and a lowlight of Tavis's entire life).