“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up.” Are those the words you’ve always wanted to hear spoken to you? Or perhaps you are the one ready for your closeup. Look no further than The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon!
The Executive puts you in the starring role, sort of. In the Executive you are the CEO of a small movie studio with big dreams (or small if you prefer it that way). Create the movies you’ve always wanted keep your studio afloat in either Hollywood or Chinawood beginning in 1970 all the way to January 2020. Can your studio survive or will you be lost to the memories of hardcore movie goers? The decisions are all yours and the game offers many options along the way. Let’s officially start production on this review.
Gameplay Loop
You’ll start as a one person operation trying to get your movie studio off the ground. The game allows you four different options to get started. Your starting amount and starting theme pool size will correlate with your game difficulty. If you choose Easy, your parents had $30 million in 1970 to give you money to open a studio and you’re educated on 15 themes. If you have a royalty deal, the patron will just take 10% of all of your earnings until you pay back $33 million and you know slightly less themes (10). Difficulty increases from there giving you less themes and less time to pay back the loan.
Once you choose your character and studio, the game will help you get started by giving you goals. When you make your first movie you’ll enter pre-production, name your movie, choose your budget size, genre, theme, rating, director, lead role, and production team. Of course, at the start you are the entire production team. Good luck! You’ll see that through game play there are ways to unlock an additional genre and a supporting role. There are 14 genres to choose from and a few starting themes. You’ll get the opportunity to unlock more through research and game play.
Your film will move into production where you’ll allocate budget for the film to writing, costume/makeup, and set design. You won’t have access to premium features just yet, but there’s plenty of time to learn and grow. The movie will move from production to post production where you once again have the opportunity to allocate parts of your budget to special effects, sound design & music, and editing. However it’s not just the work on set that goes into movies, how will you distribute this movie? Early on your only options will be third party domestic distribution. Without a sales team, you probably won’t have the best of deals, but all studios start somewhere. Choose a distribution team and then wait to see the reviews roll in.
Once your movie is out, you’ll see the theatrical run on the right hand side. You’ll also be ready to begin working on your next movie. If you are following the game’s steps, you’ll analyze where you went right (or wrong) with your first film. Your CEO will have the ability to produce a movie, do a bit of networking, or analyze the movies. While their skills are varied, they don’t start out very high so don’t expect your CEO to be able to do it all. You will absolutely need to hire some people in the near future.
After your first film is released, you’ll have access to the research menu to unlock upgrades for your studio. Are you ready to uncover more themes for your movie? Ready to consider hiring new team members? Or will you start unlocking premium production and post production features? Don’t worry about those Ancillaries, those are time locked until home video is more common in the late 1970s.
The Executive will take you through a few prompts such as hiring your first employee, giving you goals like having $40 million in the bank, and moving into the small office, because your dreams won’t fit in the tiny office. After some prompts, the game is completely up to you. The prompts will just help guide your through the basics of the game since there is a lot of balance. Following their initial prompts will help you to learn how research points are generated to unlock more game features. Then it’s up to you to build the studio of your dreams.
Alright, CEO, show us your stuff
This is where the real fun begins. Each year the Gaspar awards are announced with four movies nominated. Think of this as The Executive’s version of the Oscars. Will you win a Gaspar? Or are you just out to make the most money of any studio? Will you grow your team too large and go bankrupt? Will you unlock the premium features or keep your movies bare bones? The choice is yours because you are the behind the scenes star.
As your studio grows, you’ll notice the talent you can hire will also ask a lot more along the way. This means their fees and their percentage cut will be higher, even if they don’t fully believe in the script or the audiences and critics don’t believe in them. Part of the fun of hiring talent is looking at the names. Who is Leorge Gucas? Thirley Semple? So many of the names are recognizable as plays on names of famous actors and directors. Some of your fun may be trying to recreate films and seeing if the audiences and critics will agree on the hits (or flops) of the year.
As time goes on, you’ll also start to see different events that will come up beyond just the Gaspar award. In December of 1979, home movies will transform the movie landscape. This is a time where you’ll want to go back to your research tab and unlock home entertainment. Home entertainment to be a great stream of passive revenue, including for movies that weren’t hits on their release. The home entertainment tree will also have additional features such as cult classics and behind the scene features. You may also want to consider having your team members sharpen their skills instead of idling when not working on a project. As CEO though, you may end up having to make some difficult decisions just when you think you have a chance to sit and nap!
As CEO, you may want to solidify your studios standing by winning a Gaspar award. The competition will always be tough as the AI seems to know exactly what the critics are looking for each year. One day that red envelope will open and reveal that a movie of your making has won, if you can figure out how to appeal to the committee. Get your speeches ready, just in case.
Keep in mind there is only one category during the Gaspar’s so you’ll have to make the best overall movie you can if you want a chance at winning. There aren’t categories for different types of movies so you’ll be competing with everything from action to comedy to horror. Feel free to decide that the real victory is the money you made. No one will see your awards until the final score anyway.
All good things must come to an end
At the time of this being reviewed, the game will end January 2020. We don’t need to relive the impact of the pandemic on the movie industry do we? This does mean if you are a completionist like this reviewer, you’ll want to try to unlock everything before January 2020.
Once you hit January you’ll get your final score based on all that you’ve accomplished in your 50 years as CEO. Consider this your retirement review. This is what you’re passing to the next generation, at least you’re out before it all takes a nose dive. Of course you could also lose much sooner if your studio goes bankrupt and you’re unable to take a loan from anyone, but that would never happen to anyone here right?
Something is missing
While The Executive captures many genres and themes, there still seems to be this feeling that something is missing. It’s possible that this game will have future updates that will include some of these areas, but I’ll highlight a few that I thought could possibly give the game more variety to solidify the game.
The first thing that really struck me was that our options to begin our studio were Hollywood, USA or Chinawood, China. In a future update, it could be interesting to see Hindi cinema included or perhaps a focus on Bollywood added to areas you can begin your studio in. Could Bollywood mean that domestic audiences have less fatigue from dancing and musicals? From a development perspective, this could mean more layers of programming but I think it could add another layer to these game play elements.
While making movies, it’s very interesting that there is no option to make animated films. It is possible this could be included in a future update should the developers keep working on this. Another feature that might be great while making movies would be to allow for two themes instead of just one. How can I recreate Twilight if I cannot choose werewolf and vampire as both of my themes to try and make tons of money to make the movies that will actually matter?
When it comes to the employees you hire, it’s also interesting you can’t check in on them from time to time to make sure they are happy. There’s no way to give employees increases, which means unless they come to you unhappy about their salary and looking for more, they have the potential to just sort of stagnate and become unhappy. It would also be interesting if your production team suggested movies to you. Perhaps they could say they have a movie they’ve been wanting to make and you can put trust in your high potential employees. Let them make a pitch and as CEO you decide if its worth it or if it’ll drain your resources.
The impact of streaming is another area that feels ready for a future update. In the age of streaming, could your studio decide to release straight to Netflix movies? How would this impact your bottom line? Since The Executive takes us all the way to 2020, not including the home entertainment of streaming feels like a miss. Of note though, is that the ancillaries area of the research menu does feel empty, so perhaps this is in the works?
My speculation that there is more to come is based on the fact that we can only get into a medium sized office. In moving spaces, there seems to be a slot perfect for a large office. Does this mean that the developers are hard at work at filling in these gaps? In the coming months, will we have the ability to move into a large office? I look forward to seeing where this could go.
Final Thoughts
The Executive is a game that players will lose hours to in the best of ways. While it does have some room for improvement, it is a strong showing from Aniki Games for their debut game. This is definitely a game that allows for multiple playthroughs to find your optimal play style. For those looking to get into simulation games, this may seem slightly overwhelming but the tutorial works well to bring new players to the genre. Overall, The Executive is a solid game that promises hours of gameplay.
The Executive – Movie Industry Tycoon premieres on February 11, 2025, on Steam and GOG. The Executive was reviewed on Steam. Thank you to the developers Aniki Games and Publishers Goblinz Publishing and Maple Whispering Limited for the review code.
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