General Tips

When you first load up a game of The Movies, you'll want to be sure to take the tutorial that's available to you. You can skip it if you want, but the tutorial is going to be the best way to learn the many nuances of the game, and will give you a lot of tips as you proceed through the first couple of years of your movie empire. It won't necessarily give you specific tips on how to make the most of your lot, though, so we thought we'd go ahead and put out some pointers on how to start rolling in the cash fairly early on.

Starting Out

Practice Makes Perfect

After you build your first Stage School, you'll probably wind up attracting only four potential workers for that building. Most of the early movies you're going to be making will only have room for one star, so in our opinion, it's best to make two stars and two directors with your first four prospects. That will allow you to have one movie in production and another one in rehearsal, or two in production at the same time, depending on how many sets you're willing to build for yourself.

Speaking of sets, it's probably best in the early going to concentrate your efforts on one or two genres of films. If you're playing with the tutorial, then you'll have a couple of scripts show up at your studio gates automatically, but after you build your first Script Office (which will be available for building at the beginning of the game if you play without the tutorial, as a note), you'll be able to instruct your writers to create scripts in specific genres.

Practicing a genre will have long-term benefits for your stars.

The reason this is important is because you can command your directors and stars to practice in a given genre when they're not filming or rehearsing a new film. If you task one director and star to practice on a lot, you'll be told in a pop-up what kind of genre that they'll be working on; the generic Stage, for instance, will usually be tasked to romance films. If you make a director and a star practice together, they'll gather experience in the genre and will hopefully gain a better working relationship, as well, so that when you go to make a film of the genre that they've been practicing, they should both perform better, which will result in a better film that gets better reviews and makes more money, all of which will help your studio's prestige level.

As time goes along, it seems profitable to have actor/director pairings to concentrate in one genre of film and pump out those films over and over again, with periodic dips into another genre just for the sake of variety. If you have an actor and director that specialize in a certain genre, then you'll find that they should quickly start imparting large bonuses to the quality of films in that genre; so long as you can keep them happy, keep building new sets for the novelty factory, and build better Script Offices to produce better scripts, then you should be able to steadily improve the quality of your films, which will make them gross more, and will also result in higher star power for your stars.

Keep Cranking Out Scripts

After you build a Script Office, hire the scriptwriters that come to your door, then task them to relentlessly start churning out scripts as quickly as possible. Scriptwriters don't have moods, so you don't have to worry about overworking them, and indeed, the more they work, the better they'll get at writing scripts, resulting in higher quality productions down the line.

Of course, you'll probably wind up creating more scripts than you can actually use at this point, so be sure to invest in a Star & Script Selling Facility. You can drag your excess scripts (saving the highest-quality scripts for yourself, of course) to the Selling Facility and dump them on other studios for extra cash. This is also true when you first build an advanced Script Office; when you do make a new office, you'll be able to create scripts with a higher star rating. You can push the older scripts through production, if you wish, but you might want to just sell them and concentrate on the higher-ranked scripts as they become available.

Plan For The Future

Between all of the buildings that you need to build and some minor landscaping, such as laying down grass around your structures, you might find yourself outlaying quite a bit of cash in the first year or two of your studio's existence. This isn't a bad thing, though, and in fact the investment you make in your studio now will pay dividends later on. After all of your initial construction and prettification is done, you'll likely be down to around 20 or 30 thousand dollars in the bank before you release your first film and start making some of it back.

(As a note, we found it handy to build two Stage sets at the very beginning of the game. A lot of the very first scripts that you produce will use the Stage, so it's helpful to have a backup in case you need to practice Comedy on one of them while shooting an Action on the other.)

It's not perfect, but it works; have your sets clustered together, and keep your low-traffic buildings out of the way.

Even before you start laying down your initial buildings, though, you'll want to start planning ahead by laying all of your sets in the same general area. Your sets, Casting Office, and other high-traffic buildings should hopefully be clustered together, with another nearby area set aside for the large number of trailers that you'll need to build later on. It's most important that your sets be built near each other, though, to reduce the time it takes to walk from the Casting Office, or from set to set when films start using more than one set. It can be tough to lay out enough space for the sets, though, since they can easily wind up taking a third or a half of your total available land (if not more) if you insist on building one of each kind of set. Just set aside a lot of land for sets. If you hit the M button to bring up a bird's-eye-view of your lot, it's probably best to build the sets off to the left or the right, then start working your way up to the north wall, rather than have them stretch out east to west.

By the same token, you should also try to recognize which buildings can be built well away from the core of your studios. We're talking here about things like the Crew Office, Production Office, Script Offices, and other buildings that your people don't need to reach too often. You can drag scriptwriters back to the Script Office whenever they walk away, for instance, and finished films can be shuttled around between the Production Office or the Star & Script Selling Facility with your mouse, requiring little input from your peons. You can safely set aside a corner of your lot for buildings like these, away from the areas where your stars have to walk around. Just make sure that they're well connected to paths leading back to the main portion of your lot, so that your Builders can come along and repair them as needed.