Welcome to the Movies Fantasy League Preseason

All that time you spend obsessing over box-office tracking figures* and devouring dispatches from the assorted fall movie festivals* is about to pay big dividends: Our Movies Fantasy League is back, this year with more prizes and hoopla than ever before.

For the uninitiated: The MFL is a free game that invites you to select a team of eight movies that were or will be released in 2024. You earn points for each movie based on achievements such as box-office performance, critical raves, and awards success, and whoever has the highest score following the Oscars on March 2, 2025, wins their choice of a Roku TV, a Roku sound bar, or Bowers & Wilkins headphones, among other great prizes. (To see more details about prizes and gameplay, visit the league hub.)

For returning players: Try to contain your excitement.

Registration for the MFL will open next Tuesday, September 10 — that’s when players will be able to begin submitting their teams. Our draft guide, which contains details on every movie eligible for the game this year (this is last year’s, for example), will publish the same day. If you’d like to receive a reminder when the registration window opens, enter your email here:

You have until Thursday, October 3 to sign up. After that, the season is underway and teams begin accruing points, especially if they selected that weekend’s marquee release, Joker: Folie à Deux. All MFL participants will receive a newsletter with commentary from master of ceremonies Joe Reid and scoring updates every week until just after the Oscars, when the game wraps up and winners are announced. (If you prefer your Joe Reid–designed games to provide more immediate gratification/frustration, may we suggest Cinematrix?)

If you have any questions, you can send them to moviesleague@vulture.com. Otherwise, here’s ’til next week.

*Neither close attention to box-office forecasting nor diligent following of festival results is required to do well in the MFL.