Welcome To The Fantasy Box Office Draft
How to set up your league and start drafting.
If you are reading this installment, you are hopefully about to begin your journey in Fantasy Box Office League. Get ready for a fun year of trash talking and getting emotionally attached to the daily box office returns of some really bad movies you would otherwise never care about.
Whether you’re new to being in a fantasy league or just want to learn the ropes of this particular game, this newsletter will walk you through the whole process.
So let’s get started.
Do you have a league set?
A league is not complete without players. Hopefully, you have already convinced a few friends who love movies, numbers, and goofing off in group chats that this will be a really great time (It will be!). Being in a fantasy league requiring multiple drafts a year and engagement in the group chat is a big ask on paper, so make sure you find people who you know will have a great time. Nothing is worse than having somebody in a league who doesn’t want to be there and can’t get out. At least Fantasy Football is only the length of a season. This is an entire year+.
Once you have found those players, a quick reminder that you can set up your league here. Just follow the sheet. It makes things very easy.
Do you have a channel for communicating?
Having a group chat is critical for both the functionality of this league and for trash talking. Consider iMessage (If you are all blue bubbles), Discord, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, etc. If you haven’t set one up, fix that before you start drafting.
Do you have a place to draft?
Now that you have a team, the next question you need to ask yourself is how you plan on running this draft. Maybe you plan on hosting your friends at your house, ordering some pizza, and drafting some movies. Or your friends live across the country, in which case hosting a Zoom or Google Meet at a designated time may be a good idea. Or if you are really struggling to coordinate something, you can do this over a group chat over a few days (We have done group iMessage every time and have had zero issues. Either way, you need to make a plan).
Tech Note: Use a real computer if you are a league admin running this. This app currently runs out of a Google Sheet. The mobile experience for Google Docs is pretty hit or miss, and I ran into issues hitting the “confirm league picks” button during a draft when I was on the road with a heavily locked down work laptop and my personal iPad.
Optional: Do you have a prize (or punishment)?
You should definitely have a prize or prizes, even if it’s really stupid and you’re just doing this for fun. Everybody in our league were the lucky recipients of this mug I photoshopped commemorating all of the drafted movies that lost $100m+ at the box office in 2024 as well as Walmart’s deeply cursed color-changing macaroni and cheese tie-in for Wicked.
Had I not had to cancel my LA vacation over the summer due to my at the time sick cat (He’s doing a lot better now, don’t worry!), I probably would have picked up a fake Oscar on Hollywood Boulevard to gift to our lucky winner. But I’m sure you can find something meaningful or deeply stupid.
Regarding a punishment, we skip that because we just want to have fun. But as a league admin, you can figure all of this out. Here’s what the original creators of this game did as a punishment. This is not an endorsement, just an example:
…And a Loser: To keep every studio engaged and fighting the whole year, we also recommend having some sort of punishment in place for the player that finishes last. For our four-person league, we make the loser live stream themselves watching a marathon of movies hand-selected by the other three players. The day our 2022 loser Travis had to marathon Star-Wars-job-loser The Book of Henry, animated travesty Foodfight!, and Disney Channel 9/11 original Tiger Cruise was a highlight of all of our years (and a lowlight of Tavis’s entire life).
Enough of that, let’s start drafting!!!
It’s Draft Day
Draft Day is a 2014 American sports drama film directed by Ivan Reitman, and starring Kevin Costner and Jennifer Garner. It’s also a thing your league will have to do in order to acquire their 2025 movie slate. If you have never been in a fantasy league before, we are here to help explain some of this sports fantasy stuff to you.
Your league is set, they all came up with ridiculous team names, and they’re ready to go. You can either as the league admin be the sole editor of the spreadsheet (and give others in your league viewing rights) and select their picks as they make them over the group chat or IRL, or you can give them edit access and allow them to select when it’s their turn. There is no right or wrong answer. At the end of the day, you are using a Google Sheet generated by someone else, and even you can’t go in and fudge the numbers (No, you can’t say Argylle grossed $1 billion).
So when you draft in Fantasy Box Office League, you will be doing a snake draft through a thoughtfully designed spreadsheet that allows you to select the available movies from a pre-set list. Trust the sheet.
If you’re really stuck you can email fantasyboxofficegame@gmail.com, but I really don’t think you will have to do that.
What even is a Snake Draft? 🐍
In 2018, fellow writer in this Substack Nick Johnston (And writer for Vanyaland) drafted me into his Fantasy Football league despite me complaining about knowing absolutely nothing about football. He was kind enough to email me a PDF titled, “The Nick Johnston Guide to Not Totally Fucking Up At Fantasy Football.” So let’s start with the introduction that he provided, because this applies verbatim to Box Office League:
So you’ve decided to join a fantasy football league. May God have mercy on your soul.
The Draft:
We’re doing a snake draft, which means we go from 1-10 and go back down 10-1, so that the dude with the 10th pick doesn’t kill himself while all the other good players are taken.
So what this means for those of you who are unfamiliar with fantasy leagues is that the draft order will be: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, and so on and so on until all slots are filled. Being first will have advantages, but being last does too.
If you are a league admin, consider using a random number generator to make the initial order fair. In future drafts this year, those who are in last place will get the opportunity to draft first (Or select what number they want to be in the draft). If you’re in last place, you still have a shot. Just ask the people in our league who were dead last before making the comeback of the year with The Garfield Movie (+$107,211,519) and Inside Out 2 (+$1,198,641,117) and likely winning the whole game.
In a traditional fantasy draft for a league such as football, you can pick your players in any order you want (So maybe you’ll want to grab the best Quarterback to start, or a Running Back, or a Wide Receiver). Fantasy box office league takes the decision-making out of that process as your league will start by drafting Hit Picks, followed by Seasonal Picks, followed by your Bomb Picks.
Step 1: Draft your Hit Pick
What will the most profitable movie of 2025 be? Make the right pick and this could make your game. Remember that the most profitable movie won’t always necessarily be the highest grossing movie of the year when production budgets come into play (Remember that big movies also tend to come with big budgets), but having a movie in the $1 billion club can certainly put you on the path to victory.
This is the only time you will draft a Hit Pick this year, so choose wisely.
The four most profitable hits of last year according to Fantasy Box Office:
Inside Out 2: +$1,198,641,117
Deadpool & Wolverine: +$838,073,645
Despicable Me 4: +$719,258,948
Moana 2*: +$415,168,328
*Still in theaters
Step 2: Draft your seasonal picks
If you are starting your newsletter for 2025, your league will now select multiple movies that will be released between January 1st and April 30th. This is not usually where your biggest hits will originate, as this tends to be a sleepier season than the Summer or Fall movie calendar. However, there will be some gems in the mix.
The four most profitable movies from January 1, 2024 to April 30, 2024 according to Fantasy Box Office:
Kung Fu Panda 4: +$335,189,492
Dune: Part 2: +$239,444,358
Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire: +$234,250,016
The Beekeeper: +$52,720,535
Step 2.5: An Alt Pick?
Your Alt Pick is your final pick of this batch that will be your insurance policy if one of the movies on your slate gets delayed out of 2025 entirely, shelved, or sent to streaming. If one of your other above (non-hit) picks are delayed, this one will be put in its place.
There were only two instances last year in our league where a first pick of any kind was thrown off of the slate:
Mickey17: Within days of our league starting in 2024, Parasite director Bong Joon-ho’s big-budget sci-fi starring Robert Pattinson was removed entirely from the release calendar with no new date in sight (Although it is dated for April 18th this year, so it could be your pick should you choose), triggering his Alt Pick of the box office failure The American Society of Magical Negroes.
Horizon: An American Saga - Chapter Two: Kevin Costner’s self-funded series of epic westerns was supposed to be released in two parts over the summer of 2024. After the poor box office performance of Chapter One, Warner Bros pulled Chapter Two off of their slate entirely. The eventual winners of our league had Chatper Two drafted as their Bomb Pick, allowing them to formally select a bigger and even worse bomb… Red One… This is a good transition to the Bomb Pick section.
Note: A movie being delayed into later in the year will not trigger the need to use an Alt Pick. It will just stay as is, just with a later date as long as it stays in 2025. For example, the likely winners in our league bet early on It Ends With Us, originally slated for February 2024. It was delayed to that August, but they were able to keep it, eventually earning $288,460,656 in profits.
Step 3: Bomb Pick
This is the funniest one, but also the riskiest. Here, you must make a gut call on what will be the biggest flop of 2024. What movie will cost an insane amount of money that nobody will see? Sometimes, this is obvious. Megalopolis was one of the easiest flop picks going into 2024. Sometimes, this will take us by surprise. Did anyone actually think Joker 2 would be reviled by audiences and lose hundreds of millions of dollars in 2023? Nah.
This movie will not go on your slate, but your opponents will be stuck with it.
A few of the biggest money-losers of last year:
Red One: -$440,067,066*
Argylle: -$403,778,939
Megalopolis: -$326,132,753
Joker: Folie A Deux: -$268,599,713
Borderlands: -$242,021,490
The good news is that this is your opponents’ problem to deal with. Everyone in your league will have this movie on this slate except for you. Enough flops on the plates of your opponents may damage them to the point that no amount of mega-hits can save them. But in the case that your movie is an unexpected hit, they will get to see the profits and you won’t.
Confirm Your Picks
Once you have all followed the sheet and made your picks, it’s time to start the game by pushing the big button that says Commit Draft Picks.
Congratulations! You have just drafted.
What’s next for this newsletter?
Fantasy box office league will (hopefully) be starting soon for you and your friends, and there will be no shortage of hits, flops, and industry drama. This newsletter will keep you up to date with weekend box office updates from a league perspective, fantasy analysis from the author of The Nick Johnston Guide to Not Totally Fucking Up At Fantasy Football himself (including boom/bust picks), and so much more.
So if you’re starting your first Box Office League, don’t forget to subscribe! We hope that we can be part of your journey into a ridiculously fun game.