WTM3 is live in beta — and you're invited to break it.
After months of work, the next version of Whatthemovie is finally ready for you to try. WTM3 is a complete, ground-up rebuild of the site you know: same game you love — guess the movie from a screenshot — rebuilt on a modern, fast, mobile-friendly foundation.
Play the beta now: beta.whatthemovie.com
Read this first — it's a sandbox
The beta runs on a separate server using a backup copy of the database. That means:
- It is completely isolated from the live site. Nothing you do here touches your real account, points, uploads, or stats.
- You can log in with your existing username and password (as of the backup snapshot, taken June 1, 2026) — or create a fresh account to poke around.
- The database may be reset or wiped without warning during the beta. Don't treat your beta progress as permanent. This is a playground, not the real thing.
What's new in v3
Same game — guess the movie from a single frame — but almost everything around it has been rebuilt. The big ones:
Play it on your phone. Really. WTM3 is fully responsive and built mobile-first: a real slide menu, a bottom nav bar so your most-used actions are one thumb away, lazy-loaded images, and layouts designed for the phone first. Uploading, solving, voting, browsing, the forum and the shoutbox all work on a small screen. It's also a PWA — add it to your home screen and launch it like a native app.
A clean slate. A decade of tech debt wiped out, a brand-new frontend, and one consistent dark design system across every page. The result: faster pages, SPA-like navigation (no more full reloads), and a calmer, less cluttered look.
Uploading, reimagined — AI-assisted end to end:
- Black bars cropped automatically — letterboxed frames get detected and cropped for you.
- Duplicate detection on the fly using image embeddings, before a shot ever goes public.
- Tag suggestions from the visual content, so you keep the ones that fit.
- Missing movie? One-click fill of title, year, director, cast and poster from external sources.
- Resumable uploads — close the tab, come back later, your draft is exactly where you left it.
- Anonymous posters — Until the SotD is picked or the contest is over, posters names are not displayed, same for ratings.
- Awesome Credits — You can rescue/save shots from rejection (from you or other posters), bypass contests limit, bypass NS limit too by using your Awesome Uploads/Credits.
Lists you can browse and lists you can build. A curated Critics' list and an official Top 250, plus your own custom lists of movies, shots, or people — public or private.
Real pages for actors, directors, writers & characters. Every credit is now a real profile with a filmography and every shot they're in — click a name and fall down the rabbit hole.
Make it social, make it yours. Add fellows, build a DVD shelf to track what you own, have seen or plan to watch, bookmark anything to come back to later, follow a shot to keep an eye on it, and watch it all roll up in your own activity feed.
Play a whole franchise. Browse sagas — Star Wars, the MCU, Bond and more — and hit play random to get a random shot from anywhere across the saga.
Search that finally works. Filter by genre, year, decade, director, actor, writer, language, runtime and rating, across shots, movies, lists and people — with shareable, bookmarkable URLs. From any film, pivot to every other title from the same studio or country.
On-site notifications. Scruffy is retiring: notifications now live in a proper notification center with read/unread state, grouping, and one-click actions.
Stats, a lot more of them. A 12-month solve heatmap, rating histogram, difficulty profile, personal records and a pace card — for every player. Supporters get a deeper dedicated stats page.
Awards in HD. Shot of the Day / Month / Year are back, every award redone in HD retina, a batch of brand-new ones, automated selection, and a memorabilia space to browse the classics.
The smaller wins. Real-time shoutbox (messages, votes, reactions and @mentions, no reloads), a modernized forum with proper threading and @mentions, site-wide social sign-in, opt-in two-factor auth, profile cover images, and account-security upgrades under the hood. A lot more small features are available or will be deployed in the future.
We need your feedback
This is a beta — expect rough edges, and please tell us about them. The more you push on it, the better v3 gets before it goes live.
- Found a bug or something that feels off? Post it on the forum →
- Have an idea or a "please don't change this"? Same place — we're listening.
Follow along
I'll be shipping changes continuously and posting updates right there.
Thanks for being part of this — let's make WTM3 great together.
