The Movies Online was the online portal for those who wished to release their movies to other gamers. As well as its own section on the general Lionhead forums, TMO allowed players to upload their own movies to the Internet for others to review and criticize. Reviews allowed users to rate movies from 1 to 5 stars, as well as leave a comment. When uploading a movie, the player could place the movie into one of five different categories: Romance, Action, Comedy, Horror, and Sci-Fi. This translated into Virtual Credits (VCs), a form of virtual currency that was used to buy new props, costumes, and sets, and to advertise online movies.
When the game was first released, a "propshop" was advertised as the only way to spend VCs. Moviemakers were asked, not required, to upload their movies made using the game, earning them around 500 VCs. Each review was worth 200 VC. After The Movies Stunts & Effects was released, The Movies Online entire site was remade. The new TMO featured a way to advertise movies to the general public, using movie posters. Movie posters were uploaded and could be posted to the main movie-poster spot on the homepage for 1,000 VC. Posters were randomly shown. This was, besides the propshop, the only "official" way to spend VCs.
Every week, Lionhead picked out six movies to be featured on the TMO homepage. These movies could be submitted to fansites, who generally contacted Lionhead on which movies they nominated. The "Hall Of Fame" was the 9th TMO chart. Before the site was re-done, there was a "Top Stars" chart, in which Top Stars were featured on the site. The Top Stars were fictional, and were often judged by how many films they appeared in on TMO. The charts were generally updated every six hours. The exact formula for how the charts were resolved was not publicly known, but numbers of unique viewers, peer rating and time elapsed since release of any given movie all played a role in calculating chart position.[citation needed]
On 18 July 2008, The Movies Online was taken offline due to server problems. On 4 August 2008, the servers were fixed. On 2 September 2008, The Movies Online experienced yet more technical difficulties. These had been solved to an extent but much of The Movies Online website did not work including the chart system and many bugs remained. On 7 November 2008, it was announced by the Lionhead team that The Movies Online would be closing on 5 December.
On 5 December 2008, The Movies Online was shut down after three years and one month active. The website since its opening in 2005 has had two million visitors and 33025270 seconds' (more than one year's) worth of movies uploaded. The reason for closure was a drop in visitors and movies being uploaded to the website. A fansite has since been set up to replace TMO called The Movies Underground, although this fansite can't use the direct uploading feature within the game and movies must be uploaded by exporting the movie to your computer and then uploading the movie through the upload feature in the site.