Letterboxd started as a cinephile’s best-kept secret. Now studios want in
Before “Everything Everywhere All at Once” was, well, everywhere, it was on Letterboxd. Before Martin Scorsese took TikTok by storm, he was logging films on Letterboxd. Before the internet crowned Ayo Edebiri as the People’s Princess, she reigned as royalty on Letterboxd.
The app started small: the cinephile‘s counterpart to the bibliophile’s Goodreads. It was a way for film fans to keep track of their recent watches and thoughts. Twelve years in, the app boasts more than 14 million users — up by 4 million in just eight months.
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A once-niche corner of the internet, Letterboxd has become an unstoppable force. While its users still skew young, its reach has broadened to distributors, filmmakers, studios and theaters striving to bring audiences back to the movies.
“We see ourselves as this little cog between the filmmakers and the audience,” Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan said.
The company has never used traditional marketing, instead relying solely on word of mouth, Buchanan said. The site’s membership spike began at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic when people were “turning to movies for company and for sanity.” Buchanan ultimately attributes the exponential growth to its virality, coupled with the efforts of the editorial and social teams.
“It’s bigger than all of us now,” Buchanan said.
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When Letterboxd Editor in Chief Gemma Gracewood attended the premiere of A24’s “Love Lies Bleeding” in March, she finally found herself face to face with “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-writer and co-director Daniel Scheinert and producer Jonathan Wang after previously only talking virtually.
“[Scheinert and Wang] just said, ‘You guys were amazing,’” Gracewood said. “‘We have so much to thank you for in terms of driving people to our movie and keeping the conversation going.’”
“EEAAO,” whose underdog tale culminated in a best picture Oscar win last year, was the second-most watched film among Letterboxd users and the site’s top-rated movie of 2022.
Letterboxd provides a diary to log films; a watchlist to plan future viewings; list-making abilities to curate movie recommendations; a review feature and rating chart rivaling Rotten Tomatoes’ Tomatometer; the ability to follow friends and critics to keep up with their opinions; and as of December, theater showtimes.
“We’re not rewarded by people going to the cinema; we don’t clip the ticket on that feature,” Gracewood said. “We just want to help partners sell as many tickets as they can because we’ve always been about the audience. And I guess we hope that as we continue to grow, it will foster more moviegoing.”
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A testament to its success, Canadian holding firm Tiny acquired a 60% stake in Letterboxd — a deal that valued the film site at about $50 million — in September 2023.
In the last few years, Letterboxd has become a marketing tool for major studios, including Universal Pictures and Sony Pictures, and independent entertainment companies like A24 and Neon. Email campaigns and banner ads on the website and app represent the more common marketing approach.
Studios, distributors and filmmakers are also turning to Letterboxd to gain deeper insights into theatergoers. The site has become a way to identify their core audience, promote screenings and get instant reactions to upcoming releases.
Frank Jaffe, owner of LGBTQ+-focused film distributor Altered Innocence, says Letterboxd is key to understanding audience interests.
“When I’m pursuing acquisitions, it is actually helpful. I’ll see something at Cannes and then I’ll go on Letterboxd afterward and be like, ‘Hey, were my feelings about this correct or were they not?’ It’s a nice tool to use to confirm what you thought about a film,” Jaffe said. “I’m constantly following new people. I’m trying to figure out where tastes are aligning these days, what kinds of crowds are going to which movies.”
Jaffe credits Letterboxd for “The People’s Joker’s” staying power.
“That’s a film that I think Letterboxd has really been able to nurture. ... In a way, [the film] never went away because of Letterboxd,” Jaffe said. “We see people joking, like [‘The People’s Joker’ screening] ended, and I saw the entire audience in front of me light up with people logging in on Letterboxd.”
The film, a parody origin story about the Batman villain that doubles as a trans coming-of-age tale, had a difficult journey to the screen. The movie was pulled from the Toronto Film Festival in late 2023 over copyright issues and was later acquired by Altered Innocence. The filmmaking team knew that “hardcore DC fans” would review-bomb their movie, so Jaffe turned off comments on the trailer on Altered Innocence’s YouTube page. Before his team could even reach out to Letterboxd with its concerns, they were already monitoring reviews, Jaffe said.
“We knew we weren’t going to convert any mega-DC fans,” Jaffe said. “But we wanted to make sure cinephiles knew about it because we knew that was the target market for it. So Letterboxd was incredibly helpful getting that in front of people.”
Letterboxd’s influence has been especially beneficial to independent films.
“Hundreds of Beavers” is a black-and-white slapstick comedy made on a $150,000 budget. The pic, which debuted in September 2022 at Fantastic Fest in Austin, Texas, is still in select theaters and has earned more than $400,000, becoming one of 2024’s most successful indies. Producer Kurt Ravenwood says it should gross half a million this year.
As “Hundreds of Beavers” traveled through the festival circuit, the team told viewers to rate it on Letterboxd.
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“I spent a lot of time on Film Twitter, Film Instagram, Film TikTok, and nothing really beats just using the Letterboxd app to track how people are feeling about a movie,” Ravenwood said.
As the “Hundreds of Beavers” team continued to market the film, it used Letterboxd reviews to determine its next move. Members began writing “j’accuse” — a joke in the comedy — as a one-word review and the team decided to run with it, putting it on merchandise.
Ravenwood says Letterboxd helped keep the film in theaters, with user reviews serving as testimonials to why theaters should play it.
As the platform continues to grow, studios and distributors have been reaching out to Letterboxd to forge partnerships.
“We know anecdotally from so many meetings with industry folks that they’re looking, that they go to Letterboxd first to see, ‘What’s the mood? What’s the vibe? What’s landing? And how can we use this to our advantage and pivoting our marketing?‘” Gracewood said.
Sony Pictures recently began tracking Letterboxd data.
“It’s really early days, I cannot tell you that Letterboxd has the secret sauce yet,” said Elias Plishner, Sony Pictures’ executive vice president of worldwide digital marketing and data analytics. “I can tell you that there are a few metrics that are public-facing on the site that you could look at today and are things that we’re studying, specifically with regard to our films.”
For its latest release, “Bad Boys: Ride or Die,” the team took note of the volume of ratings and additions to such member lists as “movies I’m excited to see.”
“That’s also good context — someone’s so excited about ‘Bad Boys,’ they want to publish it to a list to people that they’re following,” Plishner said.
The fourth film of the “Bad Boys” franchise has been marked “watched” by almost 50,000 Letterboxd members. As of last week, the film had 31,000 ratings on Letterboxd versus 100 on Metacritic.
Filmmakers are also noticing the value of a Letterboxd review. YouTuber Karsten Runquist is one of the most popular members on the site with 190,000 followers. Directors frequently ask him to review their projects, hoping an influential creator’s post will attract moviegoers.
Letterboxd has become an unexpected source of networking in his own filmmaking journey.
“YouTube, and certainly Letterboxd, in a lot of weird ways has actually helped a lot with that dream [of filmmaking] because it’s just a really easy way to get to know a lot of people in a pretty organic way,” Runquist said. “I’ve just met a lot of really cool directors who I’m still in touch with just because they wanted me to review their films on Letterboxd. ... They’ve given me a lot of career advice and industry advice.”
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Fran Hoepfner, a New York City-based freelance culture writer and Letterboxd member since 2016, also said Letterboxd has proved beneficial to her career, with her reviews catching editors’ attention and earning her freelance gigs.
“It feels like an extension of professional networking,” she said.
An internal poll of 5,100 Letterboxd users found that 85% of members went to the theater at least once in May. About a third of those users frequent cinemas three to five times monthly.
Hoepfner goes to the movies once or twice a week.
“People in my industry and in culture-writing love to talk about how movies are dying or we should be really afraid of what’s happening to movies, [but] it’s very rare that I go to a screening and feel like, ‘Whoa, it’s like really dead in here,’” said Hoepfner, 33, who boasts about 23,000 followers on Letterboxd.
The state of theatrical exhibition is a constant source of debate. One summer, “Barbenheimer” is selling out theaters and the next, the domestic box office is suffering its worst Memorial Day weekend in almost 30 years — barring pandemic years. “The Garfield Movie” and “Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga,” the two big weekend releases, failed to match the success of other post-pandemic Memorial weekend titles, including “Top Gun: Maverick” and “The Little Mermaid.”
While this Memorial weekend revived a box office panic, it’s not exactly cause for concern, said Daniel Loria, editorial director and senior vice president of content strategy at BoxOffice.com.
2023’s dual strikes by writers and actors created a dry spell for everyone in Hollywood. Crew members are still feeling the aftershocks.
“The narrative in the press was, ‘Oh, my God, these movies didn’t bring in nearly as much money as other Memorial Day openers have brought in in the past,’” Loria said. “That’s true, but at the same time, ‘Furiosa’ and ‘Garfield’ performed more or less the way that ‘Furiosa’ and ‘Garfield’ movies perform. … Exhibition saw itself dealing with a very select number of titles that were supposed to fill the shoes of a very large release date. I think it’s unfair for the movies that were in that position, that they had to all of a sudden perform like a Marvel movie, when they were never really expected to.”
To date, the domestic box office has earned $2.8 billion. Although revenue in 2024 is down 25% from the same period last year and has fallen short of projections, “All is not lost,” Comscore senior media analyst Paul Dergarabedian said. “There’s big movies on the way.”
“In the industry, so many of us are in a bubble, and generally [on] Letterboxd ... there’s also people who just love movies, who are not in the industry at all, who are the audience you really want to engage if you’re a studio or even a movie theater,” Dergarabedian said. “Letterboxd can move the needle in a positive direction for studios and theaters.”
Letterboxd’s Journal and social teams have recently become a mainstay at all major movie premieres, junkets, awards shows and festivals, with interviewers asking A-listers to name their top four movies of all time, another popular feature on the site.
A monthly column by the staff called “Watchlist This!” highlights five to seven under-the-radar movies being released that month. “The films mentioned are in turn added to users’ watch lists,” Gracewood said.
Movies featured on popular lists such as the “Official Top 250 Narrative Feature Films” and “Greta Gerwig’s Official Barbie Watchlist” see sell-out screenings when they are shown at local art houses.
“We see the actions behind the scenes of people adding those films to the watch lists, and then going and watching them at the art house as they’re showing them,” Gracewood said. “Once you’re on Letterboxd, and you’ve started your cinephile journey, then you’re looking at ways to continue it. And, ideally, watch those films in the format that filmmakers had in mind in the first place. So now [when a] 35-mm screening of — pick a movie — is coming up at the theater near you, you’re gonna run and see it.”
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