After six months of work and a long beta, the next version of Whatthemovie is now live — and it's the real thing. It's the same game you know: you're shown a single screenshot from a film, and you guess the title. Everything around that game, though, has been rebuilt from the ground up on a modern, faster, mobile-friendly foundation.
This post walks through the major changes.
Your account came with you
The most important thing first: nothing was lost in the move. Your account, points, solves, uploads, awards, reviews, collection and forum history all carried over from the old site — along with your supporter status, your donation history and your Awesome Uploads. Old statistics were backfilled, so your records are intact.
- Log in the way you always have. Your existing username and password still work; we quietly re-secure your password the first time you sign in.
- A small note on usernames. A handful of older usernames don't fit the new naming rules. If yours is one of them, you'll simply be asked to choose a new one when you first log in.
- The old site has been retired. It now redirects here — this is Whatthemovie from now on.
What's new
A new look, and a faster site
A decade of accumulated clutter is gone. Whatthemovie now runs on a single, consistent dark design — calm, cinematic, and easy on the eyes — with pages that load quickly and navigation that feels instant, without full-page reloads. The logged-in home, The Hub, brings together your recent activity, the Shot of the Day, "Today in Cinema," who's online and more, all in one place. And there's a search box you can open from anywhere.
Built with mobile in mind
Whatthemovie is now fully responsive and designed for small screens first: a proper slide-out menu, a bottom navigation bar so your most-used actions are a thumb away, and images that load as you need them. Uploading, solving, voting, browsing, the forum and the shoutbox all work on a phone or tablet. You can even take five guesses as a guest before signing up.
While this is not yet perfect, most of the pages are reachable and usable.
Uploading, now with a helping hand
Adding a shot is quicker and smarter:
- Black bars are handled for you — letterboxed frames are detected automatically, with a manual override when you want it.
- Duplicates are caught before they go public, by comparing the image itself — not just the movie — so you're warned with a side-by-side preview.
- Tags are suggested from what's actually in the frame.
- Missing movie? Fill it in with one click. Title, year, director, cast and poster are pulled from external sources when the film isn't in the database yet, you don't have to enter everything manually as before – you can still add extra data or fix things though.
- Your draft is saved. Close the tab and come back later — your upload is exactly where you left it.
Real pages for movies, series, and the people behind them
Every actor, director and writer now has a proper profile — a biography, a full filmography, photos, and every shot they appear in. Movie and series pages have been rebuilt too, with a cinematic backdrop, cast and crew, trailers, reviews and a screenshot gallery. You'll also find where to watch a title (powered by JustWatch), browse films by saga, and jump from any title to every other film by the same studio or country.
Lists to explore, and lists to build
Browse hundreds of curated lists, filtered by Critics, Popular and Awards — from the IMDb Top 250 and AFI 100 to the Criterion Collection, Sight & Sound, TSPDT and the Cannes / Venice / Berlin winners, all refreshed automatically. Signed in, you'll see your own progress against each one. And you can build your own lists — of movies, series, shots or people — reorder them by drag-and-drop, and keep them public, fellows-only or private.
Search that does what you ask
Search now filters by genre, year, decade, director and actor — across shots, movies, series and people — with tags and content filters on top, and results you can sort by newest, most popular or top-rated. Every result has a shareable, bookmarkable URL, so you can send someone exactly what you're looking at.
Find shots that look alike
From any shot, signed-in players can jump to visually similar ones — matched by AI on the image itself — and fall down the rabbit hole of frames that share a mood, a palette or a composition.
Your notifications, in one place
Scruffy is retiring. The automated messages that used to pile up on your profile wall now live in a proper notification center — with unread badges, six sensible categories, filters and one-click mark-as-read. You decide how much noise you get: set each category to a bell, a bell + email, or off. Even the warm ones — a welcome, a thank-you for supporting — arrive here now. And once a week, an optional email digest recaps what happened to your shots and your fellows, only when there's something worth sending.
Supporter Stats, and your Hall of Fame
Supporters get a dedicated, deep stats page: a 12-month solve heatmap, a rating histogram, a difficulty profile, personal records and a pace card. And your Hall of Fame — the all-time and recent leaderboards — now lives right on your profile, for everyone.
Awards, in high definition
Shot of the Day, Month and Year are back, every award has been redone in crisp high resolution, there's a batch of brand-new ones, and selection is now automated — each day the previous day's highest community-rated shot is crowned. A memorabilia cabinet lets you browse the classics.
While a shot is in the running for Shot of the Day — or part of a contest that hasn't wrapped up yet — its uploader stays Anonymous to everyone so ratings and solves aren't swayed by who posted it.
Climb the ranks — and spend your Awesome Credits
Every solve earns points — 5 per shot, doubled if you're the first to crack it — and moves you up the ranks. Keep a daily streak alive and you'll hit milestones that hand you Awesome Credits: +1 at 7 days, +2 at 30, then +5 for every 100 days. Credits are the site's second currency, kept separate from points — the old "Awesome Uploads," now with a proper ledger. You also earn them by winning Shot of the Day (+1), Month (+5) or Year (+6), or by placing in a contest over in the Vault.
Credits are yours to spend, on things that used to be out of reach:
- Skip the queue — spend one credit to send a shot straight to Feature Films.
- Rescue a shot — save one (your own or someone else's) from rejection in its final hours, between 24 and 48 hours after upload.
- Queue an extra submission — get past your pending-shot limit (2 at a time, 3 for supporters) when it's full.
- Grab extra contest slots — beyond your base allowance (2, or 3 for supporters), up to double.
Every credit you earn or spend is tracked in your ledger, under Settings.
And rewards go both ways: a contest hands Awesome Credits to its top uploaders and its top solvers, with an award for the podium finishers on top — how many placings are rewarded depends on the contest type, and the creator decides whether to switch awards on.
The forum and the shoutbox
The forum has been modernized — image uploads in posts, proper threading, and full-text search. The shoutbox is now real-time: messages and up/down votes appear as they happen, no reloads. In both, an @-mention autocomplete lets you tag other players in a couple of keystrokes.
Supporters
The whole site is ad-free for everyone — supporters simply cover the hosting, and a running-costs panel shows exactly where the money goes (a dedicated server, image hosting, and so on — around €68 a month) and how much is currently covered. If you'd like to chip in, it's €1 per month = one Awesome Credit (in bundles of 6, 12 or 24 months, with a small volume bonus), via Stripe (soon) or with PayPal like before. Supporters get real extras: 3 uploads a day instead of 2, up to 5 stills from one film, 6 contest slots, a badge and avatar ring, upvote alerts on shouts and forum posts, a look at recent visitors and who favorited or rescued your shots, plus profile gallery and memorabilia customization.
A safer account
Behind the scenes, accounts got stronger: social sign-in with Google or Facebook (soon); optional two-factor authentication (an authenticator app plus one-time backup codes); and fine-grained privacy — set your wall, favorites, recent uploads, online status, bookmarks and title/character shots to everyone, fellows only or nobody (via quick presets or a detailed panel), choose who can send you fellow requests, and hide yourself from search entirely. Add safer email changes and account deletion, and tighter anti-cheat around the game.
What's next
We'll keep shipping. Now we have a stable codebase, fixes and features will be easy to ship so stay tuned, this is just the beginning!
We'd love your feedback
If something looks off, or you have an idea, the forum is the best place to tell us — we're reading. You can post your findings on the forum: https://whatthemovie.com/forum/topics/1226-wtm3-alpha-beta-version-feedbacks-bug-reports
I hope you will enjoy this new version!
Yann