About

Matt McGinnis’s Movie Riffing Melee is a Philly-based competitive game show in which random audience volunteers are pitted head-to-head to riff a movie they’ve never seen before. Players are given a script of riffs and are assigned a visual icon that will appear on screen to cue them when to say their joke in the script. Say the joke correctly and you get points! But screw up for whatever reason, and those points go away. At the end of the game, the player with the highest score wins and is crowned “Movie Riffing Royalty.” It’s all in good fun.

The show was created and developed by Matt McGinnis, and was co-developed by Joel Hodgson and Lesley Kinzel. The show debuted at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, PA, in 2024, as part of their 25th annual Blobfest event. Since then, the show has gone on to riff a number of shorts and feature films, and has been joined by guests such as MST3K’s Emily Marsh, YouTuber “Disney” Dan Becker, and Philly drag sensation, Brittany Lynn.