Movies Move into the Fantasy Sports Realm

by Kevin Kelly Oct 2nd 2006 // 5:04PM

Filed under: Newsstand, Home Entertainment, Games and Game Movies

If you are, know or live with a sports nut, then chances are you've been subjected to the trials and tribulations of fantasy baseball or football at one time or another. "Sorry, can't make it this Saturday, I've got my fantasy draft." If you've ever actually made it to a live fantasy draft, you can see how serious these games get. More than 16 million people play fantasy sports, and it's a no holds barred, take no prisoners, every man (or woman) for themselves. When you come out with a key player tucked under your arm, then it was all worth it. With the popularity of computers and the internet, it is so much easier than it was in the pen and paper days to get involved with fantasy sports. Easier to get involved, yes, but not easier to win given my losing baseball team, which finished my brief fantasy baseball career in seventh place yesterday.

Now, Matthew Berry and Brenda Spoonemore want to bring that same fervent gameplay to the movies. They are launching Fantasy Moguls, a website-based fantasy game where you make the decisions as the head of your "studio." On the site, players join a public or private league, choose half a dozen films via a "draft" and then keep track of scores in four categories: domestic gross, weeks in the top five, per-screen average and reviews.

The game is free to play, and launches sometime in October. You too can be Robert Evans and decide if the kid stays in the picture.

4 Comments

Tags: Baseball, cinematical, Fantasy, film, Football, game, games, movie, sports

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

10-03-2006 @ 12:50AM

Brenda said...

hi, Kevin, and thanks for the shout out for FantasyMoguls.com! We think there's huge potential for this game and a lot to be done generally with entertainment data and metadata (the geek in me loves that metadata), especially in creating games and telling stories about movies and the entertainment industry. We have some other cool games in development along those lines.

One of the things we'll be doing on the site is running a few different expert leagues--folks who take their movies seriously who are willing to play in a league together and which we'll then spotlight on FantasyMoguls.com during the holiday movie season (game locks Oct 27, runs thru Jan 30). Eight people in a league, six movies drafted per slate. If there are eight cinematical contributors/bloggers who'd like to participate, let me know and maybe we can set you guys up as one of our expert leagues.

Brenda

10-03-2006 @ 9:56AM

Kevin said...

This sounds kinda like a game that I used to play on the now defunct Mrshowbiz.com. It was called Summer Blockbuster if I recall and it had you setup your own studio and "buy" movies with a "budget". Then the scores where based on how well the opening for each movie was. I loved the game but of course the site was absorbed into the go.com network I think. Was always wishing there would be something else like this someday. Sounds like its finally here!

10-03-2006 @ 11:11AM

Brenda said...

wow, you are old school.

We do have a game more similar to that one coming out later this fall--more like what's called a "salary cap" game in sports where you have a set amount of money for your studio and you pick a slate of movies that fit your budget. In that version, people can end up having pretty much the same slate, whereas in the version we're launching this week, the league play and draft piece means that only one person can draft each movie--only one Talledega or DiVinci etc in a league.

This version of the game was developed by a Hollywood writer named Tom Donnelly (Sahara etc) and he and a bunch of buddies have played it offline for 11 years. Tom is working with us as is my partner Matthew Berry (aka the Talented Mr Roto), who played the game with Tom and his friends (a bunch of Hollywood writers and producers).

Having said that, Mr Smartypants, I hail from Starwave, which ran Mr Showbiz along with ABCNews.com and the orignal ESPN.com and a bunch of league sites including NBA.com. ESPN.com actually launched the first fantasy sports sites on the internet and of course Mr Showbiz launched theirs. Starwave got sold to Infoseek and then Disney etc etc and while much of the code from the sports sites survived and got absorbed into their future versions, Mr Showbiz didn't have a media partner and got completely shut down and that original game along with it.

Probably more than you wanted to know but the concept is back and we'll be launching multiple versions of this game. Look forward to the feedback!

10-04-2006 @ 3:37PM

Kevin Ricotta said...

looking forward to playing... oh and I'm a different Kevin than the Kevin Kelly that wrote the article. :)