you need a fantasy box office league
talking with Chris Tennel about movies, AMC rankings, and building fantasy sports for inside kids
This is a bit of a departure from my usual content (who cares) but a couple years ago, one of my favorite people, Chris Tennel, made a fantasy box office game — think fantasy sports, but drafting movies instead of athletes — with his film-school friends. After starting it in a series of Google Docs in 2022, he’s scaled it up into Fantasy Box Office — a free, public-facing version of the game with 3000+ (!!!) players.
I’ve been keeping track of the project for a long time and finally joined a league late last year and guys…it’s so fun. If you’re a movie fan and/or have ever been intrigued by the concept of a “parlay” without enough sports knowledge to actually participate, you should form a league as 2026 gets rolling. And it’s the preferred draft platform of Matt Belloni + Lucas Shaw on The Town!1
I was excited to get the EXCLUSIVE FOUNDER INTERVIEW and pick Chris’ brain about the game and the current state of the movie business. Questions and answers have been edited for clarity and concision. Sign up + learn more here.
Kylie: I know you very well, obviously, but not everyone has the pleasure of knowing you. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and Fantasy Box Office?
Chris: Okay, so I went to the USC School of Cinematic Arts (ed. note: Fight on), and I met many movie-loving friends there. In 2022, as theaters were reopening after the pandemic, one of my friends, Michael, had this idea for a fantasy sports game, but with movies. He had a basic framework for the rules, and we played it for the calendar year of 2022, just in Google Sheets and counting up the numbers by hand.
There were some differences between that first version and the current game. Back then, we drafted once at the beginning of the year — now, we split it up into three seasonal drafts. But I won — I beat them by like $2 billion. That definitely impacted how much fun I had with it.
In 2023, we played again, and in my day job as an editor and assistant editor, I was getting good at developing automations to speed up the post-production process. So as a side project, I started automating the spreadsheet so we didn’t have to type in the box office numbers every couple of weeks. Once we got over that hurdle, I added some other friends — so in 2023, we had three different leagues playing off the same Google Sheet system.
In 2024, I made some Reddit posts and opened it up to the general public, but it was still in Google Sheets and really janky. Something like 50 different leagues signed up—around 250 people. At the end of the year, I got a ton of good feedback, and I was very moved by the excitement and enthusiasm from all these strangers. A guy even started a Substack about the game. So I decided to take the plunge and figure out how to make it nice and shiny and polished.
(Ed. note: that Substack is here:)
In 2025 I started building the website. I was learning as I went, and building out new features as they became necessary. It was a tremendous amount of work – I never realized how much behind-the-scenes work goes into a website that you never see, that you always just take for granted. Sometimes it felt like that Wallace and Gromit clip where he’s building the train tracks while riding the train.
At some point in summer 2025 I fully launched the website as its own thing. People were finally able to find the game, learn the rules, recruit their friends, and draft their movies, without any intervention or help from me. More and more people are signing up every day, so it’s been really rewarding.
Kylie: What does the gameplay look like for the 2026 season?
Chris: It’s free to play and it’s league-based — you sign up with your friends to make a league of 2 to 5 people, and you have three movie drafts over the course of the year.
At the beginning of the year, you get together and hold a draft where everybody picks a handful of wide-release movies. You’re drafting movies onto a fictional studio, like a fake company. You have a couple picks that can be for any time of the year, and then most of the draft is focused on the upcoming couple of months. So right now it’s December, and you’re drafting movies coming out in January, February, March, or April. After those movies all come out, you get together again and hold another draft for the summer.
As the movies come out, the website tracks all of their box office automatically, and we take production budgets into account — your movie has to actually become profitable. As the movies come out, your studio loses money based on the production budget, and then it recoups it over time as the box office rolls in. You’re looking for movies that were made cheaply and efficiently and that will make a lot of money. Then the league crowns a winner at the end of the year.
Kylie: I know that there have been other fantasy box office games out there. What’s bringing players to this one?
Chris: Yeah, there have been a few. This morning, actually, somebody reached out to me on Reddit who had built one about ten years ago. He ran it for two years and it didn’t take off, and he wanted to share some lessons learned there. I’m aware of maybe six different versions that have existed over the years, most of which are defunct — the pandemic wiped out a lot of them.
Kylie: As it did with a lot of things.
Chris: As it did with a lot of things. I think our game is different because most of the previous games have been really active week to week, similar to fantasy football. So they add a lot of mechanics to make the game more dynamic, which can get confusing.
There was a game called Fantasy Movie League, run by Noovie (ed. note: this is the company that does those Maria Menounos pre-screening things). The theme was that you own a fictional movie theater, and every week you decide how many of your screens are playing which movie. You were basically trying to guess proportionally how much money each movie would make over a weekend. It was very involved — I played it with some coworkers, and everybody fell off pretty quickly. A lot of people did like that game, and when I post about my game on Reddit, people say they wish it was still around. And then there are a few games that are more focused on awards or that kind of combine critical reception and box office. But I really try to keep everything focused on the movies themselves and their performance week to week.
(Ed. note: We then got into a long sidebar talking about Moviepass’ (yes, that Moviepass) recently-launched box office game, which is tied to the blockchain and seems to involve betting on casting announcements. The website truly looks like it will give your computer a virus and/or sell you an AI wife from the Eastern bloc. Their dedication to bad business ideas is frankly remarkable at this point.)
Kylie: I wanted to ask about how working on the game has changed your relationship to movies and the entertainment industry generally. Has being so tapped into the numbers on a week-to-week basis changed how you think about the entertainment business?
Chris: Playing the game has given me more insight than building it, honestly. Big picture, it’s striking and freaky when you look at how many movies come out that don’t even touch money. A movie has to reach a certain amount of success for you to hear about it at all — and most of the movies you hear about aren’t profitable, either. But there are so many indie movies, mid-budget movies, that unless you’re forced to look at the calendar every week, you’d have no idea they’re coming out.
Obviously, movie studios don’t just make money theatrically — they’re also bringing in revenue through streaming, airplane rights, merchandising, and other stuff that isn’t reflected in the game. But based on theatrical grosses, it feels like a ticking clock on Hollywood sometimes. It’s just so hard to make money on a movie.
Kylie: That’s one thing I found interesting when I was drafting and looking through the calendar. I’m fairly film-literate, but there were so many I’d never heard of. Some of the loglines were insane.
Chris: Any come to mind?
Kylie: Solo Mio — Kevin James doing a honeymoon by himself in Italy after being left at the altar.
Chris: Oh hell yeah. I’m there.
Kylie: And there was one about two people trying to sneak out on the one night where premarital sex is legal. Like The Purge, but for premarital sex. It’ll probably be bad, but the idea is so fun that I was surprised I’d heard nothing about it. The marketing machine is so broken at this point.
Chris: The other thing I’ve found playing for so many years is that when a movie does badly, it’s really easy for pundits or casual viewers to point out the reasons it failed. Hindsight’s always 20/20. But when you’re put in the position of making the bets on what’s going to do well, you realize just how uncertain a hit is.
In a way, it’s made me more empathetic with studios and executives. When they’re making their most crucial decisions, the movie isn’t even filmed yet. They’re making casting decisions and script decisions years ahead of when audiences will see it, and it’s all theoretical. They have such a hard job.
Kylie: So it makes you more empathetic with the suits.
Chris: Those poor misunderstood suits.
Kylie: Just like Monopoly! Can you tell me more about the size of the player base year over year?
Chris: Right now about 3,000 people have signed up on the website. The numbers are a little hard to track because of conversion funnels — people sign up, make a league, invite their friends, and then sometimes sit for weeks before they actually hold their draft. But we have about 400 leagues who have started the year — up from 175 last year.
Kylie: Do you want to critique my draft?
Chris: I’d love to.
Kylie: My hit pick was Dune 3.
Chris: Nice. Dune 2 especially made good money. It didn’t make a colossal amount, but Dune 3, maybe.
Kylie: My bomb pick was live-action Moana.
Chris: This is the thing — it’s so tough and you really don’t know. I think that’s good. Live-action Snow White was the biggest loser in 2025, and Little Mermaid was a huge loser too. So they’re on a losing streak. But so many people love Moana. Then again, the Rock’s been losing lately. Could go either way.
Kylie: My winter picks were Wuthering Heights, The Bride, and Ready or Not: Here I Come. I’m the girl movie studio.
Chris: You know, your studio has to have an identity to make it in the marketplace.
Kylie: I’m creatively centered.
Chris: The Bride might be a problem. I think it’s kind of expensive, and it was supposed to come out last year as an awards play. Then it got pushed to March.
Kylie: Oh, that’s a problem.
Chris: Maybe it’ll work.
Kylie: How did your 2025 draft go?
Chris: It was pretty stagnant, gameplay-wise. All our big movies were for the end of the year. Michael took the lead early and has pretty much stayed there. I made a last-minute surge with Zootopia 2, and for a while it looked like I might take him, but he got it ultimately. Wicked and Avatar both underperformed relative to their predecessors – a lot of people were banking on those movies.
Kylie: I watched the video you made for 2022 and it made me nostalgic for 2022-era movies — Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water. And Elvis of course. Which feels so silly because we thought it was bleak then.
Chris: I know. I’ve been doing a lot of videos and posts about 2026 because there are tons of franchise movies coming out — it’s overwhelming. In my mind, it’s going to be a really fun year to play the game. But when I try to hype it up, people are like, “Those movies sound like shit. I do not want to see Toy Story 5.” And I’m like, that’s fair, actually. The movies this year might be kind of bad. But it might be fun to play.
Kylie: It’s all we have. Okay, I have a lightning round.
Chris: Yay!
Kylie: Best AMC in the Los Angeles metro area?
Chris: Burbank 16. No question.
Kylie: Worst AMC in the Los Angeles metro area?
Chris: I haven't been them all. Probably Century City.
Kylie: Yeah, purely on parking lot. Disgusting. What’s your concessions order?
Chris: Normally nothing. But last night I got a large popcorn with the Avatar bucket collectible tin.
Kylie: No Coca-Cola Freestyle?
Chris: Sometimes a Coca-Cola Freestyle.
Kylie: Thank god. Who’s getting Warner Brothers?
Chris: The devil, I think.
(Ed. note: We got sidetracked here by an extremely unflattering photo of Ted Sarandos and David Zaslav touring the Warner Bros. lot)
Chris: I know this is the lightning round, but on the subject of Warner Brothers and everything, I’m so mixed on it. It’s like death of theaters (Netflix) versus death of democracy (Paramount). Then you bring in the fact that really everyone’s trying to take down YouTube, and it does increasingly seem like the battle might not be streaming versus theatrical, but on long-form versus short-form entertainment. Through that lens, Netflix doesn’t seem so bad because they’ll at least make movies, even if they don’t put them in theaters.
Kylie: Maybe.
(Ed. note: We got sidetracked talking about Netflix’s possible move into vertical smut movies — this happens a lot.)
Kylie: It does seem like it gets bleaker every day.
Chris: Yeah. All of it.
Kylie: And yet we play our little games. What was your hit pick for 2025?
Chris: Zootopia 2.
Kylie: What was your bomb pick for 2025?
Chris: One Battle After Another.
Kylie: How many formats did you see One Battle After Another in?
Chris: Just the one. I do have my punch card somewhere.
Kylie: I also have the punch card because (redacted) gave me his. We broke up about 12 hours after that. No contact since.
Chris: Proud of you.
Kylie: Thanks. Will Hollywood be okay?
Chris: I look at this two ways. As a crew member trying to work in post-production, I think it’s doomed. I think we’re fucked as workers in the industry. A career in Hollywood was already hard, but it just requires more and more sacrifices of a person as the years go on.
But as a viewer, I think there will always be people making movies — the industry is just going to contract a lot. Soon, it’ll probably be nepo babies top to bottom, even in below-the-line crew positions. Or people who are just grinding insanely hard and are super tolerant with risk and low pay. It’s going to get gross to work in, but the movies will keep coming out.
Kylie: And who knows where they’re going to be shown. I guess that’s the open question.
Chris: Yeah.
Kylie: Great note to end on! Play Fantasy Box Office!
Fantasy Box Office is free to play — you can sign up with friends to create a league and start drafting for the 2026 season here, and they have some fun data on initial trends in the 2026 draft here. Box office data comes from The Numbers.
This feels like a full-circle moment from the 30 seconds when I was stuck with Matt Belloni in an elevator as an intern at The Hollywood Reporter and was too scared to breathe.
created a league with my friends i'm so incredibly hype