Cast-ablanca: you are the producer, and the critics are not impressed.
A daily movie-casting game where the agents pass on your first choice, the budget bites, and two critics called Skittles and Eggbert decide how your weekend went.
by Ori Iscovici
Recast a classic film with actors from another era, stay under budget, and find out what the critics think. One film a day, about three minutes.
What is Cast-ablanca?
Cast-ablanca is a free daily game that makes you a movie producer. Every day you get the same package as everyone else: a film, a director from a different era, a studio budget, and four roles to fill from a pool of actors from one decade.
Then you cast it, and the town tells you how it went: opening weekend, worldwide box office, award nominations, and two reviews.
The agents passed
My first package was Bang the Drum Slowly — the 1973 baseball film about a pitcher and his dying catcher — directed this time by Nia DaCosta, with a $45M budget and a 2000s cast.
The director pitches her vision before you start (“baseball friendship becoming an elegy as illness quietly changes the meaning of loyalty”), and the first thing the game teaches you is that what you want is not what you get. My first-choice leads had passed “on availability.” The agents sent the realistic yes-list. One actress offered a discount because she wanted the material.
That’s the small brilliance of it. Cast-ablanca could have been a list of famous faces where you pick your favourites. Instead every pick is a trade: a star eats the budget, a character actor fits the role but won’t open the movie, and the producer note warns you that “if you stretch budget to the max, the town knows it.”
I went with Mark Ruffalo, Forest Whitaker, Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman. The result: a crowd-pleasing hit, $208M worldwide, a Best Actor nomination for Ruffalo, and critics who “held back.” Skittles was positive with reservations. Eggbert was mixed. Laura Linney was the best casting of the package. She has enough laurels already; she’ll be fine.
Why the decisions matter
Jordan, who made it, is a screenwriter in New York, and the game grew out of the oldest conversation in film: who would you cast? He picked the films, actors and directors for each era by hand, and built the casting pools so the choice actually means something:
The idea was to make the decisions for casting matter, instead of just having players pick their favorites.
The result weighs how well each actor suits the role, the chemistry of the ensemble, the director’s vision, the budget — and what Jordan calls Hollywood unpredictability. Skittles and Eggbert write from those results. You can feel it in the producer’s read at the end, which tells you which casting carried the film and where the ensemble had to “negotiate tone.”
The verdict
Cast-ablanca is the best kind of daily game: small enough to finish over coffee, with enough taste in it that you want to argue with the result. The writing does most of the work, and it’s genuinely funny. It’s free, there are no ads, and it asks nothing of you but an opinion about Paul Giamatti.
A new film every day. Play Cast-ablanca →
