The Idea
The concept is pretty simple. Each Studio Wars league can handle between two and eight players. Each player acts as a fantasy Hollywood studio executive, investing an allotted amount of fantasy cash in movies he feels will make his studio the most money. Studio Wars leagues currently use an auction draft format to determine who buys which movies. After the auction, all that’s left to do is watch your movies make money at the box office (and maybe support them by seeing them on the big screen for yourself).
Become a Studio Wars Exec
To join Studio Wars and become part of the growing number of fantasy film aficionados, merely click the “Register” link in the upper right corner and follow the instructions to register and log-in. Once you’re signed in, you can click and pull down the “Member’s Menu” and either join a current public or private league or create your own. If you create your own league, you will be automatically assigned as the league administrator.
The Auction
With the new online auction feature now up and running, you can now do the entire draft from the comforts of the Studio Wars page. If your league isn’t able to draft online, you can print out the Auction Sheet on the draft kit page and manually auction with your league offline.
Auction Instructions
Once all players are signed up for a league, the league admin needs to distribute the starting amount of money to all players by clicking the “Let’s Begin” button on the league management page. This takes you to the auction page where you can choose how and when to run your league draft. Choose a start time and how long the auction should run.
The best way to run the auction is to have everyone in the league online together and auction off each movie, one at a time. However, if this method isn’t preferred or an option for your league, you can also place bids and auction off all of the movies together.
When the auction is finished, the league admin will need to finalize the results. Studio Wars will take it from there. There is no limit to the number of movies each player may purchase during the auction, and any money left over from the auction is added back into the player’s total revenue numbers, so you don’t have to worry about losing it if you don’t spend every cent.
Scoring
Each fantasy studio earns fantasy revenue from the domestic box office results for the first full six weeks each film is released. After six weeks, a film’s “fantasy value” is considered closed and any future revenue does not count toward the league results.
Studio Wars also adds a fun twist to the scoring of limited release movies. We multiply a modification factor to the revenue of all movies which have a maximum release of less than 2000 theaters over the first six weeks of release. The factor is according to the following scale:
- 1000-1999 theaters: 2.0 factor
- 600-999 theaters: 3.0 factor
- 300-599 theaters: 4.0 factor
- 1-299 theaters: 6.0 factor
We add this multiplier to increase the importance of (and thus, the interest in) the movies which are released more limitedly. Remember to take this into account as you bid during the auction.
Winning Your League
The overall winner of each league is the player who ends up with the most money. Simple, huh?
Enjoy Playing Studio Wars!
