How About a Nice Game of... Fantasy Movies!

You've heard of fantasy baseball and fantasy football, and some of you may have even heard of fantasy NASCAR. The big question is: have you ever heard of fantasy movies? I didn't until a few weeks ago when someone posted a link to Fantasy Moguls in a forum that I frequent. I was intrigued, so I checked it out and decided to give it a try. So, I rounded up some friends to fill out the roster and off we went to the draft room. I have to say it has been an interesting experience thus far.

Rather than managing a baseball team, or filling the shoes of a head coach, you step into the button down suit of a movie studio. Instead of drafting players, you draft movies. The league commissioner sets the start and end dates of the competition, and up to eight people can play. The goal is to draft a slate of 6 movies, and then hope that they do well. This is a fantasy league I think I can get behind!

I play fantasy baseball, now in my second season, but that is really a lot to keep up on. There are so many players and stats to study and track, it can be fun, in the short term, but does become a little tedious as the season wears on. On the other hand, I am a big movie guy, and with a much smaller number of items to track, I feel I can get behind it a little better.

Well, by now I am sure you are wondering just how you win at such an endeavor. To be honest, I am not quite sure, yet. There were two choices of gameplay, one being purely based on box office, which sounds a little dull to me, and the one they call Ultimate Moguls. This one takes a number of things into consideration, box office gross, per theater averages, IMDB user score, and weeks in the box office top five. Each one will garner points based on your positions, to be added to a final total. Ultimate Moguls is the version I chose for this initial foray into fantasy movies, it encourages more of a balanced slate of quality versus box office power.

The draft just recently ended, and it seems like there is a pretty good spread between the 8 studios. Here is how the draft played out:

My Studio	Team 2	Team 3	Team 4
Spider-Man 3	Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End	Shrek The Third	Blades of Glory
Transformers	Fracture	The Invisible	Evan Almighty
Knocked Up	I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry	Disturbia	Perfect Stranger
Next	The Last Legion	The Lookout	Meet the Robinsons
Halloween	The Invasion	Resident Evil: Extinction	Becoming Jane
Waitress	Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters	Atonement	Into the Wild
Team 5	Team 6	Team 7	Team 8
Ocean's 13	Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix	Grind House	Ratatouille
Fantastuc Four 2: Rise of the Silver Surfer	The Simpsons	The Bourne Ultimatum	28 Week's Later
Rush Hour 3	Live Free or Die Hard	Mr. Brooks	Surf's Up
Hot Fuzz	Underdog	Eastern Promises	Away from Her
Daddy Day Care	Nancy Drew	Michael Clayton	A Mighty Heart
BRATZ	Rescue Dawn	The Nanny Diaries	WAR (aka Rogue)

No sooner did the draft end that the add/drops began, but I am not going to get into that. I have to say that this looks like it is going to be fun. We have to track our film's outlook, and we can do add/drops so long as the movies in question have not opened yet.

Our play period begins on 3/29 and will run through 9/25. If it goes well, I may start another league up for Oscar time, or maybe even do one with my fellow Blogcritics, if there is interest, for the summer movies.

I am so much more excited about this than I was for fantasy baseball.