Movie Tycoon lets you build a film studio from 1960 all the way to 2030
How many Golden Cats are you taking home?
- Build films from genre, theme and audience
- Watch stars rise, fade and retire
- Manage your studio across five eras
The big award in Movie Tycoon is the Golden Cat. It's handed out every year across seven categories, and I can't find an explanation for the cat anywhere. But it's cats, so I don’t need one anyway.
Movie Tycoon is a film studio management sim from blacksnow games, out now on iOS and Android, and it has you running a studio from 1960 through to 2030. Every film starts with a genre, a theme and an audience.
Then comes a three-act script pieced together from story cards, and a call on where the production budget goes across acting, sets, stunts, atmosphere, sound and special effects. Presumably you can't max out all six, or there wouldn't be much of a sim.
The combinations that actually work are hidden, and the only way to find them is by picking apart how your own releases performed. I'm not really built for this. I'm the person who reads the guide before the tutorial's over, builds the optimal thing, then wonders where the fun went.
Stars have careers of their own. They rise, peak, fade and retire, so the unknown you signed in the 60s might be headlining your biggest releases by the 80s and gone from the posters a decade later. Five eras take you from hand-built sets to CGI and motion capture, and from VHS to streaming, all the way up to VR premieres, with research needed at each step to keep your studio's tech current.
On top of that, you're hiring and training crew, running marketing campaigns, working out distribution for each era, and fielding fan events and the odd risky offer. When something hits, you can greenlight the sequel straight away. Very true to life.
Movie Tycoon is fully offline, with no adverts, no timers, no gacha and no subscription. The whole first studio is free to play, and one purchase unlocks everything after that, priced at $3.99 until September 23rd and $4.99 from then on.
While you're at it, check out our list of the best tycoon games on Android, which has many more empires to build.
