Releasing a Movie The Movies Guide
Last update: 25 May 2016
Just as our studio and stars, also our movies are evaluated from 0 to 5 stars. Reaching high scores here is a crucial element of success in both financial and rankings sense. Releasing a chart-topping movie isn't any easy when you don't know what factors decide its rating, and they have roots in almost every region of our business. Let's try to analyze what we have to do in order to get as high in the rankings as possible.
Script Quality - You'll need both experienced writers and a modern Script Office - these can be unlocked by getting some of the Certificates. The better the Script Office is, the better and more time&money stealing scripts you get. To ensure the high experience for the writers, just keep ordering new scripts over and over again, not giving them a moment to rest (they don't have mood parameters on their own so don't worry). You don't have to use all of them, do you? In fact, you'll be using like 10 or 5 percent of scripts you make this way (sell of can the rest), but the experience writers get will be of great value to you.
Star Performance - A very important factor indicating how well the stars did in the movie. Three elements count here: Mood, Experience, and Genre Fit. The first one has been taken care of in Nannying the Stars section. The perfect situation is when the mood bar is pulsating green, but it is difficult to achieve it without any award bonuses or, uhm, alcohol. The Experience's influence on Performance is obvious, so don't hesitate to make your stars practice a lot. Genre Fit indicates how well the star's Looks, Age and Physique fit the genre of the movie. As we said when detailing the stars' parameters, young and good looking artists are usually in a better situation, except Comedy.
Star Relationships - Relationships between stars engaged in the movie. We can make them better by forcing the stars to talk to each other (see Nannying the Stars) or making them practice together.
Repair of Sets - Sets' maintenance value. To ensure it is high enough, manually order some workers to repair the set before it is shot at.
Crew Experience - The crew's experience grows very very slow with every movie they work on. You can't do anything about it, just keep cranking out movies.
Star Power - The engaged stars' ratings value.
Genre Interest - You have to monitor it when ordering the script. It often happens that you aren't able to choose the most popular ones, because your stars don't have experience in them, but can't really do anything about it. Watch for the events appearing on the timeline on top of the screen, as they determine the genre interest. You can also boost it with some bonuses from Academy rewards. Early in the game, when we aren't so strongly biased yet, choose the most popular genres to be released (that will be Action, probably).
Novelty Value - Each new set you build has a 100% Novelty, which degrades with every use in a movie, so it is important to diversify the sets you use.
Technology - Closely connected to the pace of scientific research you conduct in you laboratory, in Movie-Making section. Focus on this area and the "cutting edge" bonus you get will greatly help you overtake the competition.
PR & Marketing - Two factors play their role in here: rising the awareness and mixing it with appropriate opening budget. If we invest too much when releasing a movie that is not talked about, it will be but a loose of money. We can raise awareness by dragging the movie to the Publicity Office. The process takes a few minutes and can be repeated several times, so you can perform it every time shooting stops, no matter the reason (for example when you have to send a star for a drink). You can also do some PR before the movie is shot. A similar effect can be achieved by making one of our stars engaged in the project hold a press conference. In that case we also raise the star's Press parameter (but impact his Mood).