The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon Review
PC
Create your own Box Office hits in this new and excellent movie-making management simulation game.
Reviewed by Arne on Feb 26, 2025
There are many genres, some very niche, others wildly popular. Management games stand somewhere in the middle, away from the limelight, yet dominating the space with some really fun games. The genre can also take hundreds of different themes, from top-down simulations to exploration and resource or base management games.
Today's entry sits somewhere in there as you take the position of a new CEO looking to make his way into the illustrious world of Filmmaking. The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon lets you take a whack at being the Producer and CEO of a film studio as you manage your company, hire people, make films, and market them. It was developed by Aniki Games and published by Goblinz Publishing and Maple Whispering Limited
With that in mind, it is wonderful what the game has managed to do, with some really nuanced strategic elements involved with the main premise. You start off as a new and aspiring CEO, fresh into the Industry, with no connections or any real experience. You get to pick a difficulty, wherein you pick how much money you start off with. After that, you're good to go with your filmmaking dreams.
As you start, you'll be able to make small films. You get to pick the genre, theme, director, and main actor. Afterward, you assign a producer. Early on, the only producer you'll get is your character. Almost everything here is important and affects the performance of your movie.
The Genre and Theme may clash or match, giving you a boost or hindering your performance. Your director and main actor also have a few stats to consider. Their critical acclaim, their public popularity, both domestic and international, as well as their familiarity with the script's genre and theme. All of these need to come together to create a good movie.
You'll also get to select the rating of the movie as well as their size. Your movie size determines how long it takes to develop. At first, your movies will only be small. Yet, as time progresses, you'll get to create medium, large, or even blockbuster movies. In time, you'll also get to create prequels and sequels, accompanied by any reboots and adaptations.
Once you select them, the movie goes into pre-production. In The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon, your movies have three stages of development, reflecting the same from real life. You'll have them go through pre-production, Production, and post-production. Everything we covered so far was pre-production. Once you move on to Production and post-production, you'll get to allocate your budget. This allocation basically splits three sliders in each production phase.
With Production, you'll need to allocate time between Writing, Costume Design, and Set Design. And for Post-Production, you'll get to allocate between Sound, Special FX, and Editing. All of these have interactions between the Genre and Theme, where the percentage you allocate either works well with the Genre or doesn't.
In The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon, you'll also get to pick between certain premium features that enhance your movie, that is, if they match the genre. Finally, you'll get to marketing and release. Here, your work doesn't stop, either. You'll need to select a distributor, based on the date, any competing movies with similar themes or genres, and finally, their distribution cut.
All of what you do is based on synergy and compatibility between the parts of the movies themselves. Everything then comes together in the end, wherein you get your ratings and reviews. Now, in The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon, your success comes in two forms, critical acclaim, in the form of the Avocadometer, and commercial acclaim, in the form of the Sodameter.
The value here determines the two main resources you gain. These are Company Prestige and Cash. Cash is basically what you use for everything: creating new movies, hiring new people, marketing, and so forth. It is the lifeblood of your Business, and in The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon, it comes in the millions.
Not all of your movies will be a success; often, even if they are critically acclaimed, they'll flop at the box office, either due to bad timing with the release, poor marketing, or just not being fancied by the audience. After much playing and testing, there also seems to be some randomness to it, as you can have everything go your way, and still, a movie might underperform at the box office; it probably shouldn't have had such a large budget; I assume.
The second resource here is your Company Prestige, represented by the number of stars you have. Basically, the more popular movies you make, the more famous your studio is. Having high Company Prestige gives you access to bigger names in the Industry. This applies to your staff, director, and actors. It also determines the third-party distributors you can work with.
Basically, it is a measure of your success and helps you grow even faster. Be warned, though, as this will slowly decay over time. It is also affected by any flops you produce. You'll have to basically balance the two resources as many of your movies will be a box office success but a critical failure. Others will be massive money-makers but critically be abysmal.
As you develop movies, you'll also receive your third and final resource, Research Points. In The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon, your research points allow you to unlock things through the game's tech tree. Your primary way of receiving Research Points is by making new movies; however, you can also get them by analyzing created movies.
Research is divided into five categories: Business, Production, Post-production, Ancillaries, and Themes. In Business, you handle things related to pre-production, like unlocking Analytics, Marketing, and Sales, as well as new training methods, movie sizes, and franchises. You also use Business to expand and grow your office.
Production and Post-production contain the specific Premium Production Features that you can assign to your movies. Ancillaries are related to unlocking Home Entertainment deals and the cult and classic mechanics associated with them.
Finally, Themes have a unique method of unlocking. There are a total of 66 themes that can be attained. You can basically roll for 4 themes and then pick two of them. Now, themes and their effects are already a bit questionable, so having a rolling feature here feels somewhat unnecessary. It is not game-breaking, just a bit strange.
There are a myriad of other things you will eventually have to contend with. For example, you'll deal with increasing wage demands from your workers as they attain more skill, either from you training them or just from experience. Speaking of which, in The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon, your main character will also slowly gain experience, something which is heightened as you produce new kinds of movies for the first time.
The game is pretty cozy, and the gameplay loop, while repetitive, is fun. The management tycoon thing is very appealing as you watch your tiny studio grow but in terms of the movies it produces and the people it manages. You eventually can become a giant studio with multiple movies being produced each quarter and multiple awards.
The game also doesn't try too hard to be accurate or cool while also being tasteful in how it presents things. The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon is not a hard game by any means. Even with the harder starts, you'll rarely face issues with money, especially when you have a few dozen movies out there. You'll basically be swimming in money due to your Ancillaries.
The game does have more than its fair share of issues, though. There's very little info on the actual effects of things; all the while, there are about a billion things thrown your way, especially when you start off for the first time. This isn't helped by the fact that there are some accessibility and control issues. For example, you cannot open multiple tabs at once.
This is incredibly frustrating, especially since a part of the reason you analyze movies is to learn from them and use the best allocation of funds for future movies. While the game marks this once you learn it, if you decide to use two genres, you'll suddenly find that you can't even figure out what the better middle ground is. Going back to the information issue, it should be noted that developers are actively fixing a lot of said issues as they come about. And they're doing a great job of it as well.
The game's art style is actually pretty good. While you are stuck viewing just one room, which is your office, it is not static. Your people sit at their desks and work. The furniture changes as time progresses and as you grow richer, and there is also a change in the environment at points. This part of the art style is very artistic and just has a cozy vibe to it.
However, as a management simulation tycoon, the UI and effects are more important. On both fronts, The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon manages to hold its own. The UI is very well made, with parts that are very intelligent and thematic. Functionally, it could use a bit more utility, but that's mostly just nitpicking.
The jazz music that accompanies The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon is also pretty good. You'll vibe with it as you go through the years and make your movies. The small sound effects of your workers typing and the money increasing, for example, also add to the experience and help make the game more addictive.
Overall, The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon is a decent game with a lot going for it. It is fun, addictive, and well-made. It is not perfect, however, with a lot of quality-of-life things missing, as well as issues with conveying information to the player.
It could also use a codex or a guidebook in-game, where you can see all your unlocked good, bad, and best combinations of Genres and Themes. Similarly, it can do well with having savable presets or auto-confirming allocation of the budget during Production and post-production.
The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon launched in February 2025, and it's definitely a game worth checking out. It has many issues, but the developers are actively fixing them, and so far, the price is definitely worth it, especially if you like Tycoon and Management games.
Editor, NoobFeed
Verdict
The Executive - Movie Industry Tycoon is a fun, small game that has a lot going for it. It’s addictive and ultimately hooks you in. While it fails to do a lot of things and lacks some QoL systems, it's worth the asking price and is a great game.
80
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