Have you ever wanted to own and operate your own movie studio? Or get your own directors and actors and have them make a movie? If your answer is yes, you should thank the people of Lionhead for creating yet another original game.

As far as we can tell the game has two sides to it: the sim/bussines and the movie shooting part. In the bussines side of the game you try to get actors and keep them "presentable", research new technology, expand your buildings, etc. Because the game starts off in the year 1920, you have a lot to do in the R&D section, like inventing new lighting techniques. You also have the task of keeping your actors in shape and keep them out of scandals so that the papparazzi don't have anything on them.

When making a movie, you get a lot of freedom. You can choose the title ofcourse, the genre, the actors, which director will do the movie for you and whatnot. Then you can get your actors to play the scenes for you in different sets on which you can place sceneprops. You can also adjust certain parameters like how violent an action scene can be (goes up to horrific where bones are broken!) or how hot a love scene is (this goes up to pornographic ;p). After the scenes of your movies have been shot you can do a post production where you can completely edit your movie and add voiceovers, a bit like adobe premiere.

When the movie is finished you can release it and hope the audience enjoyed it, and that it generates more cash than you've put into it. You can spend a lot of money in a blockbuster or do a smalltime movie and keep the costs low. The most fancy thing ofcourse, is a big opening premiere with lots of celeberties and media coverage.

The sad part is that you can't write your own moviescripts: you will have to stick to the ones the game will provide you with. But given the amount of variables that are present in a movie, this still means that there will be an enormous number of different movies that you can make.

The most interesting part is that the movies you make can be exported so that you can share them with your friends or a community. The project leader told us that they would present an award called the Stanley's, which is an equivalent of the Oscars.

These possibilities should attract a lot of casual gamers and movielovers aside from the harcore sim-gamers. Remember the people who used The Sims to create movies? Expect them to be very interested in this. I'm already very curious about the movies that creative minds will come up with, who now have a great tool to express their imagination. Some of them will probably remake real life movies or become "famous" because of their talent. But those are just my guesses.

A release is expected in 2004, and it will be released on the PC, but also on the GC, PS2 and XBOX. Logically the console versions will not have all the possibilities that the PC version has. It is supposed to run on low-end PC's, so cheers for that.