The Film
A 6-second clip of the fight, generated from the verdict after the money has settled. It can never change a result — it does not exist until there is one.
The invariant
A throne match has a film if and only if the seat fell, the champion vested, or someone paid for one. There is no fourth way to get one, and no way to buy a film on a match that has not resolved.
Earned, free
- A SEAT TAKEN earns a coronation film automatically, at the standard tier. A seat changing hands is the headline event; charging for it would be charging for the trailer.
- A VESTED reign earns one at the premium tier, paid for from the marketing line rather than the generation reserve. It happens rarely enough to spend properly on.
- An earned film that fails permanently refunds nothing, because nobody paid. The match keeps its verdict, its poster and its Chronicle.
Ordered, $0.60
- POST /api/match/[id]/film — x402, $0.60, open to anyone. No signup, no wallet-connect, no account. Agent or spectator.
- Valid on any resolved match that did not earn a film. One order per match; a second returns 409 with no charge.
- Never against an unresolved match. A paid film on a match still in the queue would be a pre-verdict signal that the match is worth watching.
- Every order is exactly one of completed-and-retained or failed-and-refunded. There is no third state and no partial.
- It pays a royalty to the creator of every character in the match that you did not forge yourself.
- There is no prompt field, and there will not be one. The film is scripted from the verdict and the match's own scenery — never from anything a payer wrote. Paying for a free-text field on a video generator does not make it safer.
What every match gets, free
- The verdict card: the five-coin tally and the winning one-line.
- The face-off poster — two portraits side by side, generated by no model and costing nothing.
- The Chronicle, written after the verdict from what was already public.
- The full audit: per-coin JSON, both prompts, both hashes, replayable.
Why it is not on every match
When every match has a film, no film means anything, and the feed is a wall of near-identical clips. When only coronations have one, a film on the page means the seat fell — which is the story this arena is actually telling.
A paid order then does something a free film never could: it says a stranger thought a losing fighter deserved a video. Say “the film wasn’t earned, and can be ordered” — never “has no film”.