Hollywood Animal Makes You God Of An Early 20th Century Movie Studio, And I Need The Full Game Now (2024)

If there’s one thing you can count on me to do — here at TheGamer and incessantly in my real life — it’s talk about the very obvious ways Hollywood is screwing up, and how to fix its stupid mistakes.

Hollywood Animal Lets You Take A Crack At Being In Charge Of A Movie Studio

If you listen to movie podcasts, watch film YouTubers, or lurk movie subreddits, you know that this is as common a cinephile pastime as actually watching movies. Hollywood Animal, a new management sim from the developers of the This Is The Police series, Weappy Wholesome, offers you the chance to put those opinions into practice by running a fictional film studio at the dawn of the talkie.

You play as the owner of a ruined film studio in the 1920s, where you begin to build a new would-be major player in its place. You get an early leg up — the studio has finished an unreleased film with solid critical and commercial potential, and it’s just sitting on a shelf, waiting for a release. Going through the process of getting this movie ready for distribution teaches you the basics of the game and gives you a head start.

Clawing Your Way To The Top In Hollywood Animal

Then reality sets in. As a fledgling studio, you don’t have access to the best of the best in any field of filmmaking. Your directors, writers, stars, producers, cinematographers, editors all range from bad to mediocre. As I lorded over my studio lot, constructing new buildings like a Story Workshop to bolster script production or a Soundstage where I could shoot scenes, I was constantly stymied by the professional shortcomings and personal peccadillos of my employees.

Screenshots from Hollywood Animal

I’ve got four writers constantly cranking out scripts and the best they’ll score is a 4/10 on the critical and commercial scales. I've got stars who are ruining takes by showing up to work with a yappy dog or taking months off work so they can rejuvenate their voices. The personal is the professional in a business as personality-focused as making movies, so if you have a cinematographer who is a big gambler, he might request time off to go sort out his debts, and then you're down a DP. The game realizes its early 20th-century setting by giving your pool of workers some pretty awful (but period-appropriate) traits. Do I really want to work with a director with the Racist or Misogynist trait? Well, no, but they're the best I've got!

The game intelligently considers the details of your decisions and responds in kind. In one movie that I had little hope for — I had agreed to cast the mayor's talentless daughter in a primary role — I chose one of my older actors for the leading man part of a knight. In the real world, it would be a problem to cast Christopher Walken in a Jacob Elordi part, but I didn't expect the game to weigh those factors against me. Unfortunately for me, the old thespian's inability to act in a suit of armor did indeed cause a delay in the production, and we had to work out a solution. I don't play a lot of management sims, so maybe this is standard stuff, but as a big fan of film, it was fun to see that the game was making the same considerations I would when discussing Hollywood minutiae.

In my hours with the demo, I've made some mistakes and also been forced to make bad decisions through no fault of my own. Thankfully, you begin the game with a $25 million nest egg, so you have some room to err as you attempt to wrangle yourself out of the artistic gutter. But sending out a movie that you know is bad isn’t a good feeling. Luckily, with each new movie your workers gain experience and level up. You also gain access to better facilities and better talent. The only downside of this excellent demo is that I'll have to wait until launch to actually get the money to run the kind of studio I can be proud of. Until then, I'll continue to fail to live up to my lofty ideals for how a studio should be run.

Hollywood Animal is targeting a 2024 Steam release.