Fantasy Movie League Is A Weekly Battle For Box Office Domination

You'd be right to think of movies and fantasy sports as two totally separate entities. Each has their fans, their rules, their own niches of the Internet. Plus, the cross section of people who know the same about Star Wars and The Avengers as they do Y.A.C and W.H.I.P is probably tiny. Still, you had to think there was a good medium between the two things, and leave it to one of the most famous fantasy personalities in the world to find it.

Matthew Berry, aka ESPN's "The Talented Mr. Roto," is one of the founders of Fantasy Movie League, a brand new fantasy film site. The aim is simple: every week players are given the same amount of fake money to fill eight screens of a fictional movie theater. Want the week's biggest film? It's going to cost more. Want to use a movie on more than one screen? You can. Then each week, the person who makes the most money for their theater wins.

Below, find out more about Fantasy Movie League.

You can visit movie league at www.fantasymovieleague.com. There you can read all the rules, join leagues, and all that good stuff. But here are a few of the highlights.

Every week you're given $1000 to fill your eight screens. The challenge is, every week, a special algorithm assigns the films different costs based on number of screens, expected gross and more. For a week like this, where we know Jurassic World is going to be a huge hit, that movie is incredibly expensive. So do you program Jurassic World on one screen and then do seven screens of smaller films? Or do you totally forget Jurassic World and do some kind of mix of films you expect to be right under that?

Plus, like any good movie theater, you can reuse a movie on as many screens as possible and each week whatever film has the best cost/gross ratio, gets a $2 million bonus per screen. So what's going to make you more money? Jurassic World on one screen or Spy on three, San Andreas on three and Avengers on two? Considering that bonus, it's up to you to decide.

"Over the past decade I have played every possible version of the game and to us who created FantasyMovieLeague, the most fun part is always picking the movies," Berry told /Film. "So we decided to make that event – picking the movies – a weekly occurrence. Every other version of the game involves some sort of picking movies at the start of the season and then...nothing. Just sitting around. In our game, your movie selections reset every week. And because of our salary cap format you can't just load up on, say, Jurassic World. You gotta be smart. Our game is the only one that is weekly, with a salary cap, and offers prizes. Oh, and it's 100% free to play."

Prizes you say? Yes. Each time you win a week, you get a number of "Golden Tickets," which are entries into weekly and then seasonal contest for Fandango gift cards. That's the reward, along with bragging rights. Finally, the rankings reset every few months, to go along with all the movie seasons. There are four seasons total.

As someone who has played a lot of fantasy sports in his life, but also loves movies and box office discussion, I think Berry and his colleagues have done a good job here. They've made this game a challenge, but also kind of fleeting. There's a lot of strategy here, but it also necessitates a love of movies, and you never get married to one movie. It's a weekly battle for box office domination.

What do you think of Fantasy Movie League? Who wants to start a league?