The monoculture? Dead. Attention spans? Fragmented. Consensus? Nonexistent.
But perhaps one thing upon which the people agree: Everybody is on Letterboxd.
At least, a certain type of everybody is on Letterboxd. A culturally savvy — but not snobby — everybody. Everybody who loves A24 movies and still misses the Dissolve. Everybody who is obsessed with Austin Butler’s commitment to his Elvis voice. Everybody who can recite Nicole Kidman’s AMC Theatres monologue: We come to this place for magic.
Letterboxd is a social network for talking about movies. Users can leave reviews and ratings, keep a diary of what they’ve seen, follow other users and make lists of different types of movies. The service is free, with paid tiers that offer small perks and an ad-free experience. High on the page, reminiscent of MySpace’s Top 8 in the early days of social networking, are slots for users to name their four favorite films — “Four Favorites” being to the Letterboxd community what a person’s sun, moon and rising signs are to those who swear by the zodiac.
Four Favorites are playful yet revealing, where even the snobbiest of cinephiles can save a slot for something silly, or where a person’s private obsessions can be safely made public. Here, “Caddyshack” can sit between “Clueless” and “Casablanca”; “8½” can go beside “10 Things I Hate About You”; “Step Brothers” can move next to “My Neighbor Totoro” and “Paris, Texas.”
It’s not just film fans who are on Letterboxd; so, too, are the people who make and star in movies. Directors Todd Field, Paul Thomas Anderson and Ava DuVernay are just a few of the filmmakers who have talked about how much they use the platform. Although some boldfaced names prefer to keep a lower profile (pop phenom Olivia Rodrigo recently told Rolling Stone that she’s on the site but refused to divulge her handle), others roam free: Ayo Edebiri, breakout star of “The Bear,” regularly leaves reviews that go viral across other social media sites, such as her perfect assessment of “The Empire Strikes Back” (“this movie is great but I was really shocked by how ugly Yoda was sorry if that pisses anybody off but I had only seen baby Yoda and adult Yoda is f---ing busted”) or her patriotic tone-poem about “Top Gun: Maverick” (“Do I hate the military industrial complex? Sure. Did I enlist immediately after the movie ended? Yes.”). Edebiri’s bio encourages people to follow her father, who is also on Letterboxd. Even the dead are on Letterboxd: An anonymous poster, under the handle Not Pauline Kael, posts the late critic’s archival reviews.
End of carouselDuring the pandemic shutdowns, Letterboxd flourished, seeing its user count climb from about 1.8 million in March 2020 to about 4.1 million by the end of 2021. Today, Letterboxd has about 10 million users in more than 190 countries and a staff that includes journalists who produce an editorial site (called Journal) and a podcast (“The Letterboxd Show”) and hold court on the red carpet, where they can be spotted coaxing A-listers to riff on (what else?) their Four Favorites. (At this year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Nicolas Cage offered up “Juliet of the Spirits,” “Citizen Kane,” “The 400 Blows” and “2001: A Space Odyssey.”)
But the real sign of Letterboxd’s cultural ascendancy is not so much its size but its second-order significance. The site has swiftly become a friendly signifier among movie fans who get it.
So many online spaces start in recreation and end in capitalism, devolving from fun playgrounds to sad strip malls where everybody is shilling something and the corporate efforts of modern celebrity — airbrushed pictures, performative political statements, shameless self-promotion — are adopted by every user.
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In its current state, Letterboxd is something of a respite from this draining norm. There’s nowhere on Letterboxd to share images of yourself, nor can you post videos. Your profile picture is smaller than a postage stamp. You can’t really be an influencer on Letterboxd in the traditional monetizing-your-posts sense, although it’s funny to imagine how someone might try: “Literally would never have made it through all three hours of Oppenheimer without this energy drink. Use my affiliate code IAMBECOMEDEATH for a discount at checkout!”
When the writer Megan Abbott, a Criterion Collection contributor, strikes up a conversation with someone at Film Forum or Metrograph, “One of the first things we do is ask, ‘What’s your handle on Letterboxd?’” she said. “It’s like a secret code.”
Stacy Plumb is a college senior who started the popular “letterboxd reviews with threatening auras” account on X, formerly Twitter, which shares screenshots of creepy and/or snarky reviews from the platform. (A 3.5-star review of “The Menu”: “this would never happen at an olive garden.”) In fact, the proliferation of such one-liners may be fueling the beginnings of a Letterboxd backlash among those who resent seeing more complex films discussed so flippantly online.
Still, “in my program, there’s film students,” Plumb said. “And the first thing they ask you is, ‘What are your top four Letterboxd favorites?’”
Since the early 2000s, the modern viewer’s first act of reconnaissance when deciding whether a film is worth seeing has been Rotten Tomatoes, which distills a movie’s merit into two percentages — one for critics, one for audiences — and crowns any sufficiently reviewed movie that cracks 75 “certified fresh.” But for anyone seeking nuance or depth, the narrowing of a movie’s appeal down to data points can feel reductive. More distressingly, those numbers are drawn from a largely homogeneous group of reviewers: According to a 2018 study from the University of Southern California analyzing three years of Rotten Tomatoes Top 100 films, male critics outnumber female critics about 4-to-1, and 83.2 percent of critics are White. Since then, Rotten Tomatoes says it has added more than 1,000 “Tomatometer-approved critics,” ⅔ of whom are from underrepresented groups, and half of whom are women.
As Emma Seligman, director of the comedy film “Bottoms,” has found, “there’s just more queer people, people of color, and women [on Letterboxd] than in the traditional film establishment. As much as I love traditional film criticism, … I care more about what people of my identity are loving and watching and talking about at this point in my life and career than I do about getting good reviews.”
As a filmgoer, Seligman added: “I feel like I only see a movie now if I see that people are talking about it online, particularly on Letterboxd. If I know other women, queer people, Jews, young people in general are watching something and are excited, I know that will be represented on Letterboxd and not as much in the traditional film journalism establishment.”
Perhaps Letterboxd’s individualistic energy can be attributed to the fact that it was hatched not in Silicon Valley or Hollywood but in New Zealand, where everything is a bit out of step with the rest of the world (for instance: it’s usually already tomorrow there), by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, entrepreneurs who started as web designers. One of their early efforts was a pre-YouTube service where New Zealand filmmakers could have their digital tapes transferred and shared free online. They launched Letterboxd in 2011, pulling key information about the movies not from IMDb (Internet Movie Database), whose application programming interface was prohibitively expensive, but TMDB (simply: The Movie Database), a crowdsourced alternative.
Their ambitions, Buchanan told me via Zoom from Auckland, were modest. “Really, all we had in mind was we wanted to make a cool app where you could see what your buddies were watching and make it a little bit of a home for yourself [for] sharing what you liked, what you didn’t like, and keep that record for yourself. I think we had no pretensions to anything like the sort of place we find ourselves at in the industry now, where this little niche network seems to have wiggled its way into a much bigger machine.”
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Like “Hot Ones” and BuzzFeed’s puppy pile, a Letterboxd interview is fast becoming a don’t-skip promo stop. Actors talk about their four favorite thematically appropriate movies (you might have seen Jennifer Lawrence drum up interest in her recent film “No Hard Feelings” by sharing her favorite raunchy comedies) and directors go long on their cinematic influences.
Earlier this summer, Greta Gerwig provided a “Barbie” watch list for the site, going deep on the 33 films that inspired her hot-pink summer blockbuster, such as “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” and “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg.” The day I spoke with Buchanan, Letterboxd had just welcomed its newest member: an up-and-coming filmmaker named Martin Scorsese, who shared an official watch list of 59 films he drew on for his latest epic, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” and swiftly gained some 280,000 followers.
“I will say, lovingly, that the folks on our distribution and publicity team bring up Letterboxd a lot,” said Seligman, who, alongside “Bottoms” stars Edebiri and Rachel Sennott, did a spot with Letterboxd on their high school movie watch list. (Including but not limited to: “Mean Girls,” “She’s the Man,” “Bring It On” and the straight-to-VHS oeuvre of Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen.) “They know it’s something young people are on and excited about.”
In September, Buchanan and von Randow announced that they were selling a majority stake in Letterboxd to Tiny, a Canadian technology holding company, in a deal that reportedly valued the site at more than $50 million. Though Buchanan says he has no imminent plans to leave Letterboxd, the move is intended to prepare the site for a future without its founders at the helm. In his Journal post about the acquisition, Buchanan promised that, aside from the formality of new ownership, “very little else will change.”
The unobtrusive energy of the Tiny deal seemed to please Letterboxd lovers, but one potential change in the acquisition announcement verged on sacrilege: that Letterboxd plans to expand into television.
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This news was greeted with the same nothing-gold-can-stay dismay as the recent report that A24 would be eyeing “action and big IP projects,” abandoning the auteur-driven work that put it on the map. Would TV not dilute the purity of the Letterboxd experience? Should people who started smoking cigarettes because they saw “In the Mood For Love” have to wade through the pedestrian takes of people who started smoking cigarettes because they watched “Mad Men”?
Buchanan said that Letterboxd has been talking about integrating television into the platform for years. He is aware that, on Letterboxd’s feedback site, the topic of adding TV is the item with the highest number of downvotes. “So that definitely informs our thinking,” he allowed, though he added, a bit on the defensive, that he attributes some of that “trepidation within our audience” to “a little bit of ignorance as to how we might approach the addition of [TV] series.” He hopes Letterboxd obsessives will “trust us not to mess it up” while adding, as reassurance for the wary, that “there is no set time frame for a launch of that at this time.”
At its current punching-weight, Letterboxd can operate “as a shorthand in the way that A24 used to be, and Neon was,” Abbott said. “There’s something very Gen X about that: You have your favorite band, and you don’t want them to become too popular.” There’s a palpable fear that Letterboxd can’t stay the way it is. “We know what happens when something is pure but is getting more popular and successful.”
Buchanan had previously noted that “everyone with Netflix” could have a Letterboxd account. (At press time, Netflix has 247.2 million subscribers worldwide.) In our conversation, Buchanan said: “We’re very relaxed about the pace of our growth. … We’ve all been on networks that we feel have deteriorated over time. There will be members now who feel that Letterboxd was much cooler when it was 50,000 people. That may be the case. But I think it’s hard to want to run and create and build a network if you know that the end goal is 50,000 people and it’s never going to be more than that.”
So much of what makes Letterboxd special is that it seems designed for people who are indifferent to the site’s growth potential. If anything, they’d prefer Letterboxd to stay just the way it is.
“For the most part, there’s no clout-chasing like there might be elsewhere,” Abbott said. “It’s more that you’ll see if someone has the same taste as you,” and one review leads to another, until you start following someone for recommendations. “It’s really so old-fashioned. It’s almost like being at the old video store and listening to other people’s conversations or getting a tip from the clerk. There’s something very analog about it.”
Letterboxd harks back to the just-so-distant past, when the internet felt carefree. Remember how you used to be able to just go online and be a person — with eclectic interests, embarrassing thoughts, goofy pictures — and everything wasn’t so polished and preprofessional and this-will-haunt-your-search-results-forever? When you did not have to insist, for the 10,000th time, that you do not want to subscribe to this newsletter just because you literally purchased one item from one store one time?
Those who knew that web want it back, and even people too young to remember the garbage-disposal-crunch sound of the dial-up modem crave a simplicity that they feel they missed. As all the big social media sites have gone corporate/evil (X, nee Twitter) or boomer/evil (Facebook morphing into Meta) or influencer/evil-by-association (Instagram) or brain-melting/evil-because-of-Chinese-spyware (TikTok), the internet finds itself lousy with social media expats in search of a meeting place that is not constantly tracking or spamming people with ads or dragging them by the algorithm into a never-ending spiral of sameness.
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“Very few social networks give you the chance to cultivate your taste without yelling at you to look at different stuff or more stuff,” said Kyle Chayka, author of the upcoming “Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture.” Letterboxd reminds him of “what the internet felt like circa 2004 to 2010-ish. Smaller-scale sites, quieter. You knew who you were following and talking to. That was the era before everything was chasing after Facebook scale of billions of users.” Even people who never experienced that internet firsthand, he said, “desire that smaller scale and intimacy. … That experience is still better, and you’re still drawn to it when you can find it.”
Plumb, 21, agreed. “I definitely have always just grown up with the way the internet operates now, and Letterboxd is definitely different from every other social media app that I’m on. … There’s no hierarchy.”
Letterboxd is, for now, disarmingly straightforward and uninterested in being all things to all users. Instead, it is just a place for people who love nothing more than to go to the movies and talk about movies with other people who love movies, who appreciate takes that are poignant (on Todd Haynes’s “May December”: Charles Melton “is the personification of stolen innocence and your heart breaks for him”) and pithy (also on “May December”: “same reality as judge judy thank god”), who still believe that, despite everything, there is something singular about cinema, and something special in sharing how this art form can move you.
“I think people enjoy the fact that you’re on [Letterboxd] to share your thoughts about movies, and that’s all you’re there for,” Plumb said. “You’re not there to win a popularity contest or make money. You’re just there to share your opinions. Which I guess is what the internet used to be.”
correction
A previous version of this article gave an incorrect number for how many countries the service is used in. It is more than 190, not more than 200. The article has been corrected.
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