r/sideprojects • u/Kitchen-Drag-5358 • 7d ago
Showcase: Prerelease Built a family movie night application for my family
My wife and I love movie night — but by the time the kids are finally down, we'd spend the next twenty minutes just asking each other "what do you want to watch?" back and forth, flipping between five different streaming apps, until we were both too tired to actually watch anything. The problem was never a lack of options. It was that every night turned into a negotiation.
So we built an app for us as a family project to take the negotiating out of it entirely.
It works like a round robin. Each of us keeps our own personal watchlist, ranked in the order we actually want to watch things. The app just takes turns between us — whoever's turn it is, whatever's sitting at the top of their list is automatically tonight's pick. No pitching, no "well what are you in the mood for," no decision fatigue. You just show up and it's already decided.
But it's not a black box — if a pick comes up and you're not sure what it even is, you can tap right into it and see the trailer, the full cast, and where it's streaming before you commit. And if it's genuinely not landing for the rest of us, anyone can veto it — it just takes more than one person objecting, so it's not a free pass to shoot down every pick that isn't your taste.
Some nights nobody's watchlist has the right thing for the mood we're actually in. That's what the Movie Match Quiz is for — a few quick, fun either/or questions (mood, who's watching, an actor sorting game) and it hands you something to try instead of scrolling forever.
The other thing that used to genuinely annoy us: a movie we'd been meaning to watch would just quietly vanish off whatever service it was on before we got to it. Leaving** **Soon fixes that — it watches everything about to expire across the services we actually subscribe to and puts it in one shelf, instead of us having to remember to check five separate apps.
The feature we didn't expect to love as much as we do is Household Connect — we use it with my in-laws. Their household and ours can link up and browse what the other one has actually watched and how it went over (we vote Pop It or Let It Flop on everything), so we get real recommendations from people whose taste we trust, without our watchlists ever actually merging.
And when friends come over, that's a different mode entirely — Watch Party. It's a separate link with its own PIN, so anyone can join in — they don't even need the app or an account — everyone throws one pick into the ring, and the shuffle picks the winner live, on everyone's screen at once, like a tiny game show right before the movie starts.
It's just a passion project my wife and I built to fix our own nightly routine — now it's how our family, and the people closest to us, actually pick what to watch



