🔗 Six Degrees of Hollywood: How Cinema-Degrees Works
In 1967, sociologist Stanley Milgram famously demonstrated that any two people on Earth are connected through no more than six social links. Decades later, Brett C. Morgen applied this theory to Hollywood, popularising the parlour game "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon."
Cinema-Degrees brings this idea to your daily puzzle routine — except instead of Kevin Bacon, we challenge you to connect any two movies as efficiently as possible.
The Core Concept
You're given a starting movie and a target movie. Your goal: build a chain connecting them, where each link in the chain is a movie that shares an actor or director with the previous one.
For example:
The Dark Knight → (Christian Bale) → American Psycho → (Guinevere Turner) → Go Fish
Each arrow represents a shared cast or crew member. The fewer links, the better your score.
The Degree Ladder
Cinema-Degrees uses a tiered system based on how many connections the puzzle requires:
| Tier | Difficulty | Required connections | |---|---|---| | 2-Degree | Intro | 2 movies apart | | 3-Degree | Standard | 3 movies apart | | 4-Degree | Hard | 4 movies apart | | 5-Degree | Expert | 5 movies apart | | 6-Degree | Master | 6 movies apart |
Guest players can access the 2-Degree puzzle for free. Registered users unlock additional tiers as they complete the daily main puzzle.
How the Graph is Built
Under the hood, Cinema-Degrees precomputes a weighted actor-director graph across our entire movie database. Every movie is a node; every shared actor or director creates an edge between two movies.
When generating your daily puzzle, we run a Breadth-First Search (BFS) to find the guaranteed shortest path between the start and target movies — this becomes your optimal reference score.
Your rank at the end:
- S-Rank — You matched or beat the optimal path
- A-Rank — You were one step over
- B-Rank — Two steps over
- Tax Write-Off — More than two steps over (but hey, you finished!)
Strategy: How to Win
1. Think in Prolific Actors First
Actors who appear in 20+ films in our database are your best connectors. Think Samuel L. Jackson, Meryl Streep, or Tom Hanks — they're cinematic superhubs that can connect almost anything to anything else.
2. Use Era as a Clue
Films from the same era share more cast overlap. If both your start and target are from the '90s, try to stay within that decade as you chain.
3. Genre-Pivot Technique
If you're stuck, pivot through a genre that acts as a universal crossroads. Horror films, for example, are surprisingly well-connected to mainstream Hollywood.
4. The Blockbuster Bridge
Large franchise films (Marvel, Fast & Furious, Harry Potter) cast enormous ensembles that overlap with everything. When in doubt, route through a blockbuster as your middle step.
Your Purity Score
Beyond raw efficiency, Cinema-Degrees tracks your Purity — whether your path was:
- 🎩 Indie Route — You used mostly smaller, independent films
- 🎬 Blockbuster Route — Your path ran through franchise megahits
- ⚖️ Balanced Route — A mix of both
This is entirely cosmetic, but die-hard cinephiles tend to develop very strong opinions about their purity scores.
Try It Now
Cinema-Degrees is completely free to play as a guest for the 2-Degree tier. Sign up to unlock the full ladder after you complete your daily puzzle.
