Greenlight is a free movie-studio game — a Hollywood riff on the viral 162-0 "build the perfect season" engine. You run a studio for a year: spin a studio and an era, greenlight one real film per genre, and find out whether your slate is good enough to earn the corner office — or get you fired.
A perfect year at the movies is a Best Picture-caliber slate: a lineup of five films that's great on every axis at once — beloved by audiences, praised by critics, huge at the box office, and a smart return on its budget. The catch is that no single film wins all four — a critical darling underperforms commercially, a blockbuster gets panned. Your job is to assemble a balanced slate that comes as close as possible to the Perfect Studio benchmark. That benchmark is the best legal slate the game itself can build, so matching it is the holy grail.
One film fills each of five genre slots:
The reels spin a studio (Disney, Warner Bros, Universal, Paramount, and more) and an era (5-year windows from the 1970s through the 2020s). You draft one of that studio's films from that era to fill an open genre slot, then spin again. You get one studio respin and one era respin for the whole draft — save them for a reel you can't use.
Pick a mode on the home screen before you draft. Whichever you choose, the mode is shown above the reels the whole time so you always know which game you're playing.
The classic game. The reels spin a studio and an era; you draft one of its real films to fill an open genre slot, with full stats shown on every card. Fill all five, then the studio head judges your year on box office + budget + audience + critics combined — a slight tilt toward the money. No film tops every axis, so chase a slate that balances all four.
The same studio draft, but you greenlight blind. The reviews and box office are hidden — all you get is the title and the year. Trust your gut, lock the slate, and find out what the studio head thinks of your instincts.
The same studio draft, but now every film carries its real production budget and you build under a $400M cap. Here's the catch: a star-studded box-office monster eats your whole budget, while a quietly great film at a fraction of the cost is a steal. The best slate isn't the most expensive one — it's the smartest. Hunt the underpriced classics; value matters, and an overpriced flop is a trap.
The whole game flipped upside down: assemble the worst slate in movie history and chase the lowest score you can. The reels still spin — now you're hunting bombs, pans, and forgotten misfires. Every watchable film you greenlight drags your disaster back toward respectability, so aim for a clean Golden Raspberry sweep.
Named for the most infamous money-pit in Hollywood history. Spend the most for the worst reception: blow the full $400M on expensive films that flopped, and chase the worst dollars-per-quality in the business. A spend floor applies — the whole point is to waste money, so cheap-and-bad doesn't count.
One shared puzzle for everyone, every day — a rotating lens that spotlights a single axis (an audience day, a critics day, a box-office day, a budget day) or a flop day where the worst slate wins. You get one ranked attempt, and your score lands on a global leaderboard; come back the next day to keep your streak alive. Your standing shows on the home screen whenever you reopen the app.
Greenlight solves the "compare across eras" problem the same way every film is graded on four real-world axes, each turned into an era-fair 0-100 percentile:
Your Studio Score blends all four axes across the five films, with a slight commercial tilt — Box Office + Budget make up 55% and Audience + Critics 45% ("if you make money, you get a second chance"). A perfect studio is great everywhere; a single soft genre drags the whole year down. In the Daily, the day's lens scores on a single axis instead (or on 100 minus that axis on a flop day, so the leaderboard always sorts high-is-best). Your score maps to a studio-head verdict — from Studio Legend and the corner office all the way down to You're Fired.
Greenlight is built on real films bucketed by studio and era. Audience and critic scores come from TMDb and OMDb (Rotten Tomatoes); box office is era-adjusted and budgets are CPI-adjusted to today's dollars, so a 1970s production and a 2020s one compete on fair footing. Every number on a card is a real film's real performance — your only job is to greenlight the right ones.
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