Anyway, on to the task at hand: changing up your slate to get the maximum amount of box-office revenue. Why should you drop a movie, and how should you pick which one you'll replace it with? I'll look at the question from a purely Box Office Moguls perspective -- Ultimate players, you'll have to extrapolate the reasoning to all the other categories. I know you're all superheroes in the making, though -- you can do it.

The Box Office Moguls game scenario is great because nothing matters but grosses -- that leaves you free to draft films like Wild Hogs or Norbit without worrying about the damage they could cause to your IMDb score, or whether they'll open well enough to bag you some PTA points on those first couple of weekends. But by no means is your work done when the draft ends! You can always be searching for improvements.

The most common reason to add a new movie is that a change in the release date of one of your current films pushes it past the end date for your league. Current players who drafted Sunshine, or Balls of Fury, or The Nanny Diaries, or The Kingdom (like me) know the feeling.

That's not the only reason to make a change, however. Maybe something better just falls into your lap. Maybe an owner in your league drops Wild Hogs, for example, the week before its release, afraid that bad reviews will dampen ticket sales. When that happens, why not drop a potentially lower-grossing film like The Lookout or The Reaping to grab the Hogs? Hindsight is 20/20, of course -- even I wouldn’t have guessed that Wild Hogs would top $100 million. But it’s usually safe to bet that family comedies (two years ago, Are We There Yet? and The Pacifier came out of nowhere) and teen-friendly genre movies (dance films, like Step Up or Stomp the Yard, are a good example) will have at least respectable grosses.

You likely won't find a surefire blockbuster in your league's mass of available movies, but what films are floating in that free agent pool that might be upgrades? One possibility for players in spring leagues is the return of Ice Cube in Are We Done Yet?, which opens Wednesday (act quickly!). It's a sequel, and might not have the success of the first film ($18 million opening; $82 million total gross), but I expect it to rack up a good $40-50 million by the end of April, when many leagues finish play. Firehouse Dog, also barking up the box-office tree this weekend, could be a sleeper hit as well. Director Todd Holland has enjoyed success in television with Malcolm in the Middle, so he at least knows how to make families laugh.

Disturbia (April 13) could be another potential Box Office Moguls savior. Though the market's been saturated with horror movies this year, a PG-13 fright flick is usually a good bet for fairly solid grosses (aside from 2005's Darkness or 2006's The Return). Dark Water helped Fantastic 4 break the box office out of a slump in July 2005, and the remake of When a Stranger Calls broke Super Bowl weekend box-office records in 2006. (Big year for Shia LaBeouf -- he's got Disturbia, Surf's Up and Transformers all before Labor Day.)

A good rule of thumb when formulating your Box Office Moguls slate is exposure. If you haven't heard of a particular film when you see it on the draft board, then it's likely that many others haven't either. Studios will often wait until closer to the date of a movie's release to focus on marketing it, but in general, an obscure-sounding title (or at least one that doesn't ring a bell), will more often than not fail to provide spectacular grosses.

The same goes for most limited releases -- fewer screens means fewer locations at which to earn money. Watch out for this when you're deciding whether to add a film to your slate. Sometimes a prestige release can end up being beneficial -- Babel made $34 million by the end of the Holiday season -- but those types of films are mostly Ultimate Moguls juggernauts and don't have much to offer in terms of Box Office Moguls clout.

If a film is the only new wide release scheduled for a given weekend, that often means that no other studio wants to compete with it (recent examples are Revenge of the Sith or X-Men 3), and so a good box-office take is likely. (On rare occasions, a film will open unopposed because other films simply moved off the date to fit post-production schedules, or angle for a more awards-friendly release date.) It logically fits, too, that if there's only one film being released, then it stands to benefit from being the only option for people who want to see something new.

It's true that something with the box-office potential of Revenge of the Sith won't be available in any league's free agent pool, but summer blockbusters aren't the only movies that open unopposed. By watching the release calendar, you might find a dark horse money machine in a similar situation. (You might find The Covenant: it was the only film to open on more than 1,600 screens on Sept. 8 last year, but mustered a first-weekend take of just $8.8 million.)

When picking a new movie to add, you'll want it to have the rosiest outlook possible. So where might you find buzz about your own films' potential (and that of possible additions)? Our own Steve Mason provides great weekly columns that gauge the tracking for upcoming new releases. You can also find quite a bit of information by scrolling through the message boards on IMDb. Another useful site is WorstPreviews (http://www.worstpreviews.com), which has buzz charts that measure the popularity and interest in upcoming films over time.

That should get you started. Weeding out the likely misses from your slate and replacing them with potential hits is far from a exact science, but the more you experiment, the sharper your predictions will become. If only earning money for yourself was as simple as garnering more cash for your slate, eh?