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Since 2017 Vulture, New York magazine’s entertainment site, has hosted a pop-up studio at the Sundance Film Festival where it conducts interviews and shoots videos with actors and directors. This year, Vulture also provided a very specific piece of merch: a hat reading “Zero Oscar Nominations.” The hat is a reference to Cinematrix, Vulture’s movie trivia game, now celebrating its second anniversary. Using a grid-based interface, Cinematrix tasks players with responding to clues intersecting along an x and a y axis. (What is both a “Toni Collette” movie and a movie “Released Between 2000 and 2020”?) The hat was an instant hit with the Hollywood set, according to Neil Janowitz, Vulture’s editor in chief. Ahead of the Oscars, which airs Sunday, March 15, New York has been running a marketing drive for the “Nominations” hat.
Aside from cheeky swag, Cinematrix has “become a very valuable business for us, especially in the past year,” Janowitz said. The game has netted sponsors ranging from Hulu and Focus Features to Ravensburger, the games company, as well as collaborative partnerships with the horror-focused streamer Shudder and the cinephile-catering Criterion Collection. Vulture has also spun off a video series showcasing actors and directors being interviewed while playing Cinematrix. In the week after the first interview, with Edgar Wright, the director of Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver, the game’s traffic jumped 17 percent. (Vulture did not share traffic numbers, but the game is a fixture on the site’s “Most Popular” list.)
Games have become a core part of journalism’s business model. In late February, a financial data platform called Fiscal.ai posted a chart on its X account showing that subscribers to the New York Times who are paying only for news are dwarfed by subscribers paying for the Times’ package that bundles news with non-news products such as Wordle, Connections, and Spelling Bee, along with a bold claim: “The New York Times is no longer a news company.” (It’s worth pointing out that news-only subscribers were grandfathered in, and the Times no longer offers a news-only subscription.)
New York has long been known for its crossword puzzle (Stephen Sondheim once wrote some of its entries) and the Movies Fantasy League. Cinematrix—produced in partnership with a company called the Movie Grid—was an instant blockbuster. “There was this immediate surge of excitement around it,” Janowitz said. Since then, Vulture’s editors have responded to nearly all reader emails about the game, many of them impassioned demands for transparency about rejected answers. Vulture has also run a mailbag column answering reader queries. (Why doesn’t Magic Mike XXL count in the “‘Number in Title” category? Because “XXL isn’t a valid numeral in the Roman system”—it’s a reference to “the size of the guys’ big ol’ dicks.”) Said Janowitz: “People still email us. There’s a knowingness to it. It’s all really chill. It feels like a community.”
Not that games success is any kind of panacea: Vulture’s parent company, Vox Media, has undergone recent waves of layoffs in which mostly noneditorial roles were affected. In January, Vulture laid off two people. Vulture did not comment about the layoffs, but Janowitz did say that the game’s success had led Vulture to hire two new full-time staffers. “And that’s one game,” Janowitz said. “If we can find other formats that catch on, think what that might enable us to do.”
Janowitz jokes that the media industry is so unstable that it feels like every six months, his staff says to each other, “All right, well, we gotta invent new ways of doing business!” But Cinematrix’s success has provided a modicum of stability. “It’s been,” Janowitz added, “therapeutic.”
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