NOW SHOWING: A Cinema Programming Game
Battery Games · Sep 22, 2026
You are the person who decides what plays, and when. One cinema, seven days, five slots a day. Which new release to sign, which revival to licence, what to spend on the house, whose trust to keep. These are the calls a cinema programmer makes, week after week.
About 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 al
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