By skyforbes fantasyboxofficegame.com
Just want to start off by stating that this is not a paid ad and this website is totally free to use.
Two years ago I was looking for a way to get more nerdy about movies. I love fantasy football and had heard of some similar games centered around the box office, so I did some googling and found a post on reddit from u/Chris_Tennant saying that he had made a game that runs off of Google Sheets. I messaged him and we ended up chatting on discord and he said it was a work in progress but he was looking for people to play it and give feedback. So I put a couple leagues together, two leagues with my coworkers and one with some other r/movies mods, and long story short we had an absolute blast with it.
Chris has been working on this thing like crazy since then and this last year he upgraded it from a Google Sheet to a [website](fantasyboxofficegame.com). It looks great and is really intuitive. This year I’m running four leagues and it’s been a wild year for the BO and anyone who follows the news will tell you it’s only going to get more unpredictable. Here’s how the game works.
The game consists of three drafts throughout the year, one every four months, in which you draft movies only for the coming four months. Jan-Apr, May-Aug, Sep-Dec.
When you select a movie you take on the burden of 2.5x that movie’s budget upon release.
So if you pick a movie with a budget of 100mil, you get negative 250mil when that movie comes out and then gain the box office for its entire theater run as it happens.
There are essentially three different kinds of draft picks.
- The Hit Pick. One movie chosen from the entire calendar year that you are betting on to make all the money. You only get one of these per year. You will probably want a major blockbuster.
- Seasonal Picks. 3-4 of these per draft, so 9-12 total. This will make up the bulk of your roster. You can adjust how many depending on how many people are in your league or whatever rules you want.
- The Bomb Pick. This is a pick that you think will lose a lot of money, and it goes to all of your opponents rosters instead of yours. You only get one of these per year and they are chosen during the first draft, much like the Hit Pick.
As the movies on your roster release, you take on their negative budget and watch it slowly climb back up as it continues to make money. Here’s what our current season looks like:
Each of those datapoints is clickable to see what movie release it is and you can see the numerical stats here (please do not roast me for picking Snow White, no Disney Live Action Remake had lost money before this):
We have been playing this for two years now and the drafts are always so fun and unpredictable and there’s a surprising amount of strategy to it. You don’t always know budgets this far in advance so you have to gamble a bit on which studios are more conservative with their budgets and realistically how expensive movies look.
So get some friends together or organize a league here in the comments with other redditors. It’s totally free and if you’re a movie nerd like me then I can vouch that this really adds a lot of fun and investment to every release!