NOW SHOWING: A Cinema Programming Game

You decide what plays, and when.

Seven days. Five start times a day. Thirty-five screenings to fill, and never quite the right films to fill them with. Welcome to the chair.

Read the week before you book it

Five audiences come to your house — families, youth, working adults, seniors, cinephiles — and they do not come at the same hours. The film that sells out Saturday at seven plays to an empty room on Tuesday morning. Every cell on the board tells you who is likely to walk in. What you put there is your call.

Sign the new release, or licence the revival

Distributors offer you new films on their terms: a minimum number of runs, sometimes a clause demanding your best slots. Take the deal and you owe them those screenings. Revivals work the other way — you buy a fixed number of runs outright, and every booking spends one. A shelf of old films you own outright is freedom. A tentpole with a prime-time clause is leverage. You will want both, and you will not be able to afford both.

Two kinds of trust, and they pull apart

Standing is what the public thinks of your house. Credit is what distributors think of your word. Standing fills seats; credit decides which films you are offered at all. Serving one usually costs you the other — and some weeks the right move is to pay the penalty, break the contract, and keep the audience.

Spend where it pays

Better seats. Better sound and projection. A concession stand people actually use. Staff who make them come back. Or put the money into advertising this week and see it return by Sunday. The house you end up with is the one you chose to build.

Choose how long you have

Thirty weeks, sixty, or a hundred. The term is the difficulty, and it is also how much of this game you will get to see. Pick it once, at the start. It does not change.

Then find out what the week was worth

Open the doors and watch it run: the house counts up day by day, and the numbers land. At the end of your term, a certificate — Staff to CEO — printed with your cinema's name and the figures that got you there.

What is not in here

It does not run on a clock you cannot see. Nothing grows while you are away, nothing needs checking in on, and there is nothing you can pay to make time pass faster. It does not go on forever either: you set the length before you start, and at the end you are graded on what you did with it. Every film is invented — not one is a real title, and not one is a parody of one. One cinema, in Japan, for exactly as long as you chose.