The Movies

Other products by Feral Interactive

Product Features

• Design your own studio and run it from the early days of cinema through present day and beyond in Story Mode by managing studio resources, investing in RD and maximizing box office success
• Make your own movies - Make movies that appeal to the masses in Story Mode or in Sandbox Mode you can jump into any era and create your dream movie.
• Control the destiny of your cast and crew - Fire and hire them, turn unknowns into movie stars, and take full creative control over script selection and the content of the movies you'll create.
• More than 30 hours of continuous gameplay, thousands of exciting movie characters, and limitless options allow you to vary just about everything
• Show the world your talents - Post your movies to the web for all to see.

Product Details

• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00026D13A
• Product Dimensions: 7.5 x 5.2 x 1.2 inches ; 8 ounces
• Media: CD-ROM
• Release Date: November 8, 2005
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (69 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #2,269 in Video Games (See Bestsellers in Video Games)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #40 in	Video Games > PC Games > Simulation
  #50 in	Video Games > PC Games > Strategy

• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Platform: PC

Amazon.com Product Description

Imagine you could make any movie you wanted to. Imagine you could pluck someone from obscurity and make him or her the hottest star in Tinseltown. Imagine that you had control of an entire movie studio, competing with others to create a string of box office smashes. Imagine being able to use your judgement alone, deciding whether success lies with epic action pictures or lots of low budget, hammy 'B' movies.

Will the stars you've so lovingly groomed develop monstrous egos - refusing to accept that they are now too old to play the romantic leads that made them famous? You can help, but there are only so many times you can send them to fat farms and plastic surgeons.

Will you watch your movies being shot or do you want to direct the action yourself? Will you decide to innovate and introduce the talkies, color or digital sound before any of your rivals? Or will you let the other studios make the investments, leaving you to jump on the bandwagon if the new technology becomes popular?

Many of the things you've ever read or heard about Hollywood are right here in The Movies - from stars having affairs and hitting the bottle to teams of genius filmmakers creating the box office hit of the year. Movie mogul, talent spotter or film director. You can be one or you can be all three. That's the magic of The Movies.

Product Description

Imagine you could make any movie you wanted to. Imagine you could pluck someone from obscurity and turn them into a superstar. Imagine you had control of an entire movie studio, competing with other studios to create box office hits and predicting what audiences want—from epic action films to campy B-movies. With The Movies, you can make it big in Hollywood by building the ultimate movie studio and shooting the ultimate picture. Choose a script and turn it into a major release. Pick or create actors and locations. Control budgets, build sets, hire and fire at will, settle into the director’s chair and film a hit. Customize unique movies within the game, then watch and review them, adding your very own voiceover or sound effects and saving them to your hard drive. E-mail your masterpieces to friends, upload them to the web or post them on The Movies’ official site for the world to see and vote on in online awards ceremonies. Just as you can create or modify unique films, you can create or modify actors, customizing their look and renaming them to resemble anyone you wish. You can even replicate every movie star currently in Hollywood and remake all your favorite films with them. Anything you’ve ever read about Hollywood—from starlet scandals to broken box office records—is right here in The Movies.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

211 of 229 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good but Flawed, November 14, 2005

By	Avalon Daughter (I wish I was in Glastonbury) - See all my reviews

Fun:3.0 out of 5 stars 

So Activision decided to jump in on the Sim gaming community and create their own version of the Sims -- Hollywood style. Not bad, but heavily flawed.

The premise of the game is to run a movie studio. It acts quite a bit like the Sims but concentrating more on the community rather than the stars that you create; your goal is to make movies as best and with as much star power as possible.

The Pros:

This game can be fun. You place specific buildings such as scriptwriting, sets, entertainment areas, trailers for your stars and map out a studio lot. You have control over all the decor and can put down grass and flowers to make it look nicer. Apparently if you plant a lot of flowers next to your stars' trailers, it keeps them from throwing tantrums.

The game goes over a timeline. You can start right from the beginning if you want -- I created a "Clara Bow" in the 20s and had fun watching her progress. You pick from a line of hopefuls in order to create actors, extras and directors. All of them learn through being in specific movie genres and practicing on sets. Example: A director who has worked on a lot of Action movie sets is not necessarily good in the beginning but results in a great director in the end.

Stars are picked out of obscurity. (However, when you get popular you can find stars from "other" studios anxiously waiting at your casting door) and you try to mold them from the beginning. Concentrate on making them over during the correct time period (you don't want a star in 50s outfits by the 60s) and you can eventually give them plastic surgery. Nip and tuck is popular in the 50s, but implants and lipo isn't really available till later in your timeline -- but be careful! Give a starlette a big rack too early in the timeline and they might get negative reviews (remember -- buxom wasn't always popular.)

Recruit scriptwriters, janitors, crew and researchers in order to help your studio progress and keep up with the times. Also, they will make "suggestions" by leading a trail of stars. What I mean is, you pick up a screenwriter to drop them into the studio to write, a trail of stars will lead to the genre that is most popular at that time. At my last game, it was the late 50s and according to my news report "the communists" sent a ship into space -- which fuels the want of Action and Sci-Fi from audiences. Get it? If you're filming during the depression, no one wants to see a drama -- they'll want comedy.

But you have to make sure that your stars are trained for those genres. When you're placing people into their correct casting areas, the one thing you need to remember is that an actor good in comedy, might not be good in drama. It will tell you as well. Same with the director.

Sets become available over time. There's whole sections dedicated to say, Sci-Fi, Romance, Action, Westerns -- you name it, they've covered it.

Now the more detailed fun is that you can literally have a hand in the movies. You can custom-write a script (which takes longer to do, of course) and add scenes, backdrops, props and sets. Not only can you do this, but you can also finish them and email them to your friends, complete with your "studio's name" on them, which, quite frankly, I found to be fun.



Now the bad:

The tutorial is an absolute joke. I've literally had to figure out how to do a number of things including deleting old sets (can you believe there's no instructions whatsoever to tell you how to do this?) and I still don't know how to turn the buildings. Their tutortials are so basic that if you know how to run the Sims -- you don't need to run their tutorials.

Interaction between the characters is limited. You want chemistry between stars? Probably a good idea to simply put them in more movies together. Other than that, there isn't any real detail of emotions.

These Sims are just plain UGLY. They're not pretty and for some bizarre reason, they're kinda a-sexual. The women from the 20-s kinda look like guys in drag. Not only that, but if you custom make over any of them and change hairstyles, you're going to get ALL the hairstyles regardless of sex. Why would I pick a balding comb-over for my female lead? Kinda stupid that they didn't distinguish. You can spruce them up with a makeover but it seems that they don't actually look like men or women until you get to the lipo/implant option in the 60s. I mean, were all women built like hulking men in the 40s? Not really.

Movement is also awkward with these sims and there seems to be some crude humor. It'll say when a star is busy and what they're doing and for some reason, most of the time they're always "pinching one off" in the bathroom. Yeah, it's funny the first time, after reading it 40 times you wonder if the programmers are prepubescent kids with a bad sense of humor or if your sims just have serious bowel problems.

You really have to play with this to get the gist -- fortunately, there's a Sandbox option which allows you to really use some liberties -- I'd recommend trying that one first before challenging yourself.

The DVD version is only different from the CD version because it includes a "Load of Extras." What that means is, your female star gets a few more hairdo's... that's pretty much it.

This is an EXPENSIVE game, I will say that. I don't think it's really worth over $40 -- I'd say it should be marked at $29.99. It's just not that high tech nor is it that "fantastic" of a game. I'd recommend a price reduction before buying it.

Otherwise, okay. Interesting but complicated, Ugly yet entertaining. Three out of five stars.

47 of 52 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pretty good! Although it may not be what you expect., November 12, 2005

By	mdizzog (USA) - See all my reviews

Fun:5.0 out of 5 stars 

This game is actually pretty good. A lot of people seem to have been let down by Black and White 2, which I can understand. Black and White 2 becomes tedious.

The Movies is more about producing movies and making money. You can make movies, but you do not have complete freedom. Instead, you have a ton of sets, and like 100 different scenes for every set that you can put actors into. This actually works out pretty well as you can create a ton of different interesting scenes in interesting ways by using tiny pre-built scenes. If you don't want to create movies, you can have script writers do it. There are seemingly billions of movies they can write. I get eager to see what kind of movie they are making when I see interesting titles and such.

You create stars, cast the movie, then shoot it. During the shoot you can alter the screenwriter's movies slightly. Or, you can let the director shoot it himself and manage your huge studio lot. You unlock more stuff as you progress, and every 5 years there are awards. The awards are hard to get, and I get excited whenever I see my name nominated.

As you progress, your stars start to want things, and eventually they become big. It's really awesome to see one of my stars become such a huge success after doing so many crappy movies. You can give your star plastic surgery and treat him like royalty by giving him an entourage. It works out pretty well, but the only downside to this is that sometimes other stars might get jealous.

There is even an online feature where you can post movies and earn more game stuff.

I would reccomend this movie to anyone who likes The Sims.

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Completly Additctive!, November 27, 2005

By	C. Canterbury "player" (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Fun:4.0 out of 5 stars 

I am a big Sims 2 fan and fan of simulation games in general (I hate to destroy anything). I had been waiting a while for this game and was a bit dissapointed when I read the reviews. Playing the first 30 min, I am inclined to agree with a lot of what is said here.
The animation is pretty bad. All the characters are hideously ugly unlike those adotrable Sims and even when you dress them up, it's kinda like putting lipstick on a gorilla.
But then, watch out.
Like a junkie you will be glued to your computer screen.
It slowly and insidiously takes you over.
You begin to build sets only to get new sets. You make movies that after a while, you don't even watch because you are too busy trying to please all your actors as much as you can to reap the rewards you will get at the "award ceremony" every five year mark. I actually cheered when my studio was nominated. I was alone. In front of my laptop. Unshaven in sweats with a sink full of unwashed dishes. Yes, "The Movies" has turned me into a junkie loser.
Even though the graphics are terrible, the 3-D effects are top notch. You can actually go deep inside any sound stage or studio to watch your movie being filmed first hand. Amazing.
I got this version not knowing there was a "deluxe" version available. Damn.
There are still a few kinks, like basic studio dressing like trees, chairs and garbage cans not being redily available and not findind a quick stress-relever for your overworked stars (dropping them into rehab is just a waste of time) other than that and the hideous looks of your actors, this is an amazing game.

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