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Random movie picker for film night

Put the shortlist on the wheel — titles or genres — and spin once. Nothing is removed and every segment is the same width, so a film that loses tonight is still on the rim next week and the wheel is not leaning towards anybody’s pick.

Photo by DerBurgunder on Pixabay

Photo by DerBurgunder on Pixabay

This wheel is already set up for the job. Open it in the editor to change the list, the machine or the odds.

Every spin draws from your browser’s cryptographic random source. How a draw is made sets out the method and its limits.

Open this wheel in the editor

Why does choosing a film take longer than watching one?

Because a catalogue turns the evening into an optimisation problem, and optimisation has no stopping rule. Every title you open makes the last one look worse, the pool never runs out, and there is no point at which the search is provably finished — so it ends when somebody gives up rather than when somebody decides.

A wheel supplies the stopping rule the catalogue is missing. Six things you have already agreed to watch, one spin, and the evening starts. The picture across the face is an empty auditorium, and it is doing one small job: marking the moment the evening stops being a search and becomes a film.

Should the wheel hold titles or genres?

Titles when the shortlist is already agreed. If four films survived the argument and all four are acceptable, put those four on and spin — the wheel is only there to end it, and a genre at that stage sends you back to the catalogue you just escaped.

Genres when nothing is agreed. A genre wheel does not pick the film; it narrows the catalogue from everything to one shelf, and a shelf takes about ninety seconds to choose from. That is why the list here is genres: spin first, then pick inside whatever came up.

What do you do with the twenty films that did not win?

Keep them. This wheel does not eliminate, so tonight’s loser is on the rim next week with the odds it always had — which is the difference between a shortlist and a queue, and the reason a film that keeps not winning eventually does.

Save the wheel and the shortlist becomes a watchlist that outlives the evening. Signed out it stays in this browser; signed in it opens on the other sofa’s laptop. Two saved wheels usually beat one long one: a weeknight wheel of things under two hours, and a weekend wheel of the ones that need the attention.

What else is this wheel good for?

It is the plain picker wheel with tonight’s shortlist on it. Where the watchlist lives somewhere else and is numbered — a spreadsheet, forty rows of it — the number wheel draws the row and you look it up.

The same stalemate about dinner is the what to eat wheel, usually between the same two people. An evening with nothing planned at all, film or otherwise, belongs to the what to do when bored wheel.

Questions about picking a film

Yes. The list has a text view: paste a whole watchlist, one title per line, and each line becomes a segment. Editing stays line by line from then on, and repeated titles fold into a single segment rather than quietly doubling that film’s chances.

Readability gives out long before the rim runs out of room: past about a dozen titles the labels are too small to read from the other sofa, and you are scanning a list again. Two spins work better than one long rim — a genre wheel first, then a short wheel of what is on that shelf.

Turn on weights and raise their entry. A weight of two makes that segment twice as wide and the percentage beside it says so, which is a more honest way to run “it is my turn to choose” than an argument about whose turn it is. Everything else keeps a real chance.

Share gives you a link that opens the same wheel, with the same shortlist, on anybody’s phone. Each person spins their own copy, so agree first whose spin counts — otherwise you have two results and the argument you were trying to end. Nothing is uploaded to make the link work.