Buzz
In the beginning, there was Wordle. Wordle existed online, and it was good. Everything sprang from it, and it multiplied: Four Wordles at once. Eight Wordles at once. Math Wordle. Subway Wordle. Gay Wordle
While most people store socially acceptable knowledge in their minds—like the winners of various sports events or key historical facts—I've spent decades filling mine with box office statistics. Name any movie from the past 30 years, and I can probably give you a rough estimate of its U.S. box office total. If it was a big hit, I might even know its opening weekend numbers. This trivia has always been pretty irrelevant—after all, knowing a film’s box office gross doesn't mean you’ll ever see any of it—until I stumbled upon the Box Office Game.
Similar to Worldle, this browser-based game gives you a new puzzle every day. But instead of guessing a word or solving a math problem, you're tasked with identifying the top five films for a particular weekend's box office. You'll be shown the studio name, the film's weekly earnings, and its cumulative gross up to that point. Guessing one of the five films correctly earns you 200 points.
I first discovered the Box Office Game on Reddit, in a forum dedicated to my favorite movie podcast, Blank Check With Griffin and David. Each episode of that podcast dives deep into a single film from a director's collection, wrapping up with David quizzing Griffin about the top box office hits during the week the film debuted. (By now, you're either grimacing at your screen or rushing to your podcast app to subscribe.) Redditor u/hebleb (real name: Mark Uvari) created the game, blending the Wordle trend with Griffin’s remarkable ability to recall which movie was number three at the box office on a random weekend, two years after his birth. Uvari, a software engineer with eight years of experience in web and mobile app development, shared with me on Reddit that he's, “a trivia fan in general, though I admit I'm not very good at my own game.” The game’s data comes from the-numbers.com, and Uvari also used an API to pull film specifics from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb). Since box office data wasn't reliably collected before the 1980s, the game focuses on weekends from the last 40 years—still offering enough variety for around 2,000 daily games. While the Box Office Game is definitely more niche compared to other Wordle clones, it also highlights the internet's power to bring together communities. No matter your obscure hobby, there's always a group of people who will make you feel like a newcomer. Also, I’m finally better at one of them than my wife.
