CineRank

CineRank is a daily film puzzle. Each round takes six movies and one measurable thing about them — audience rating, box-office take, runtime, budget, release year — and asks you to put the six in order for that statistic.

It rewards a different kind of film knowledge than trivia does. You are not asked what a movie is about; you are asked how it performed, how long it ran, or how it was received, relative to five others. A film you love can sit at the bottom of a rating list, and a film you have never seen can sit at the top of a box-office one. Separating what you think of a movie from what the numbers say about it is most of the game.

Scoring counts exact placements out of six. Each correct slot earns points, a clean sweep earns a substantial bonus, and every completed round earns a floor — so there is no reason not to finish.

Start with the film you are most certain about and build outward. Ratings cluster tightly, so the middle four slots are usually a coin toss; box office and budget spread far wider, and a single blockbuster in the set often pins one end of the order for you. Nothing is committed until you lock in.

Every movie's numbers come from The Movie Database, and the round links back to the entry it drew them from. Everybody plays the same six films on the same day.

How to play

1. Read the prompt — the movie statistic this round ranks, and the direction it ranks in.
2. Tap a film to select it, then tap a slot to place it. Tap two placed films to swap them.
3. Fill all six slots, then hit Lock In to reveal the real order.
4. Every film you placed in its correct slot scores. Six out of six is a perfect round.

Strategy

Read the direction of the ranking before you touch a film. Highest-first and lowest-first rounds look identical on the board and reward opposite orders, and a whole round can be lost to placing a perfectly correct sequence backwards. The prompt names both the statistic and its direction; it is the single most valuable sentence on the page.

Separate how much you like a film from how the statistic measures it. Box office rewards wide releases, franchises and inflation, so a recent blockbuster usually outgrosses a beloved classic. Ratings reward consensus rather than ambition, and a broadly liked crowd-pleaser often scores above a divisive masterpiece. Runtime and release date have nothing to do with quality at all.

Then place the extremes and work inwards. The top and bottom of a six-film list are usually the easiest calls, and fixing them leaves four films competing for four middle slots where the real gaps are narrow. Since only exact placements score, an ordering that is close but shifted by one scores nothing — so spend your remaining doubt on the two films you would most easily swap.

The reveal shows the real figure behind every placement, which is the part worth reading even after a bad round. Box-office numbers, ratings and runtimes each behave in their own way, and a few rounds of seeing the actual values teaches you more about how the statistic works than any amount of guessing from taste. That transfers directly: the next round asks about a different set of films but the same kind of number.

One more habit worth building: check whether the six films even belong to comparable eras or scales before you order them. A round mixing a silent-era picture with a modern tentpole is usually asking about something other than raw popularity, and a round of six films from the same year is almost never decided by the factor you would use to separate decades. The composition of the line-up tells you which differences the puzzle expects you to weigh.

Where the data comes from

Every CineRank puzzle is built from published, dated data, and each challenge links the source it drew its numbers from. These are the references we draw on:

• The Movie Database (TMDB)