Points for originality! If you like tycoon games, and you have any interest in how movies get made, this is your game.
The movier maker part of The Movies gets an unfair rap. It seems a lot of people expect a movie maker that's part of a game to have the same set of features as you might find in a professional video editing program. Which is of course nuts. In the game, when you build a custom scriptwriting office, you can write your own scripts from scratch. Each set has a number of scenes you can use, and each scene may have some customizable options, such as how the actors react in the scene, the angle used, the length of the scene, which roles to use, and what costumes to wear. It can take a lot of work to get something resembling what you envisioned to appear in the script. Instead of writing the script yourself, you can open a scriptwriting office and hire some scriptwriters to churn out a script in a particular genre. Once done writing, you send the script to the casting office, where you assign film crew, extras, a director, and actors to the primary roles. After a short rehearsal, you can put the film into production and everyone begins shooting. After all scenes are filmed (this happens more or less automatically, although you may need to deal with an ill-behaved cast or crew), you can either release the film immediately, or send it to the post-production office you've built. Inside here, is a video editing and audio engineering application. It's not that hard to use, but not incredibly feature-packed either. You can snip parts of scenes, reorder scenes or snippets, add dialog or subtitles, add music and sound effects. When you're done, you can export the movie to a WMV file and give to your friends or upload to The Movies website. And finally you release the film. Tabloids and industry journals critique the film, and it starts generating money (and hopefully a profit, sometimes not).
This whole process is time consuming, but entertaining. I play a non-sandbox game and release several films on auto-pilot before getting the itch to write and post-edit my own film, which I do, and then go back to churning out auto films just to fill the studio coffers. Gameplay is very good, but my opinion here is probably skewed by the fact that I've never seen a movie-making game before, so it gets a lot of a points for novelty. Graphics are very good, you can zoom and rotate on the 3D landscape and follow your actors around in the sets and around your lot. The sound is ok, but the "mumbly talk" used by the actors is nauseatingly repetitive. It's a unique experience, and if you like tycoon games, there's no reason not to try this one.