Box Office Game And Framed Wordle-ify The Art And Commerce Of Movies

thegamer.com:

A red bowling ball poised to hit 10 pins.

That image was the first prompt in a recent round of Framed, a Wordle-like game in which players are given six attempts to guess a movie from individual still frames, earning increasingly revealing hints as you go. For that day's game, Clue 4 was Julianne Moore with a ginger bob, Clue 5 was Steve Buscemi in a bowling shirt, and Clue 6 was Jeff Bridges staring into a mirror designed to look like Time's Man of the Year cover. And if that last image didn't scream Coen Brothers at first glance, you could look a little closer and see a banner across the bottom right corner of the faux magazine cover, which read, "Are you a Lebowski achiever?"

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Framed is remarkably simple, trading words for images with impressive elegance. But, my other favorite movie-themed Wordle-like, Box Office Game, is another story. Based on the game that actor Griffin Newman and critic David Sims play at the end of each episode of their podcast Blank Check with Griffin and David, Box Office Game gives you a date and asks you to guess the top five movies at the box office that weekend. It gives you each film's weekend gross, the number of weekends it has been in theaters, its position the previous week, and its distributor. That's a lot of information, and that's the baseline you begin a game with. If you need a hint, you can sacrifice points to see the tagline, the director, the three top-billed actors, the budget, the genre, and the final gross. If you're really stuck (and willing to sacrifice 180 of the 200 possible points for each entry), you can see a plot summary (which may, inadvertently, reveal the title). It can be overwhelming if you aren't