Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan created Letterboxd in 2011, but its popularity ballooned during the pandemic. It has grown exponentially ever since: Between 2020 and 2026, it grew to 26 million users from 1.7 million, adding more than nine million users since January 2025 alone. It\u2019s not the only movie-rating platform out there: Rotten Tomatoes has become a fixture of movie advertising, with \u201c100% Fresh\u201d ratings emblazoned on movie posters and TV ads. But if Rotten Tomatoes has become a tool of Hollywood\u2019s homogenizing marketing machinery, Letterboxd is something else: a cinephilic hive buzzing with authentic enthusiasm and heterogeneous tastes.<\/p>\n
The platform highlights audiences with appetites more varied than the industry has previously imagined, and helps them find their way to movies that are substantial. Black-and-white classics, foreign masterpieces and forgotten gems are popular darlings, while major studio releases often fail to find their footing. In an online ecosystem dominated by the short, simple and obvious, Letterboxd encourages people to engage with demanding art. Amid grim pronouncements of film-industry doom and the collapse of professional criticism, the rise of Letterboxd suggests that the industry\u2019s crisis may be distinct from the fate of film itself. Even as Hollywood continues to circle the drain, film culture is experiencing a broad resurgence.<\/p>\n
Letterboxd\u2019s success rests on its simplicity. It feels like the internet of the late \u201990s and early 2000s, with message boards and blogs, simple interfaces and banner ads, web-famous writers whose readership was built on the back of wit and regularity \u2014 people you might read daily and still never know what they look like. A user\u2019s \u201cTop 4 Films\u201d appears at the top of their profile pages, resembling the lo-fi personalization of MySpace. The website does not allow users to send direct messages to one another, and the interactivity is limited to following another user, liking their reviews and in some cases commenting on specific posts. There is no \u201cdislike\u201d button. In this way, good vibes are allowed to proliferate, while bad ones mostly dissipate over time.<\/p>\n
The result \u2014 at a time when legacy publications have reduced serious coverage of the arts \u2014 is a new, democratic form of film criticism: a m\u00e9lange of jokes, close readings and earnest nerding out. Users write reviews that range from ultrashort, off-the-cuff takes to gonzo film-theory-inflected texts that combine wide-ranging historical context with in-depth analysis. As other social media platforms devolve into bogs of A.I. slop, bots and advertising, Letterboxd is one of the rare places where discourse is not driving us apart or dumbing us down.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere\u2019s no right way to use it, which I think is super appealing,\u201d Slim Kolowski, once an avid Letterboxd user and now its head of community, told me. \u201cI know plenty of people that never write a review. They don\u2019t care about reviews. They just want to, you know, give a rating or whatever. And I think that\u2019s a big part of it, because there\u2019s no right way to use it, and I think we work really hard to keep it about film discovery.\u201d<\/p>\n
But in the end, passionate enthusiasm for movies is simply a win for cinema at large. Richard Brody, the New Yorker film critic whose greatest professional worry is that a good film will fall through the cracks without getting its due from critics or audiences, sees the rise of Letterboxd as a bulwark against this fear, as well as part of a larger trend toward the democratization of criticism. \u201cI think that film criticism is in better shape now than it has ever been,\u201d he tells me, \u201cnot because there\u2019s any one critic or any small group of critics writing who are necessarily the equals of the classical greats in the field, but because there are far more people writing with far more knowledge, and I might even add far more passion, about a far wider range of films than ever.\u201d<\/p>\n
Many users are watching greater amounts of cinema by volume. \u201cLetterboxd gives you these stats, and you can see how many movies you\u2019ve watched,\u201d Wesley Sharer, a top reviewer, told me. \u201cAnd I think that, for me definitely and maybe for other people as well, contributes to this sense of, like, I\u2019m not watching enough movies, you know, I need to bump my numbers up.\u201d But the platform also encourages users to expand their tastes by putting independent or foreign offerings right in front of them. While Sharer built his following on reviews of buzzy new releases, he now does deep dives into specific, often niche directors like Hong Sang-soo or Tsui Hark (luminaries of Korean and Hong Kong cinema, respectively) to introduce his followers to new movies they could watch.<\/p>\n
Over the last five years, indie theaters have seen a level of interest that seems to mirror Letterboxd\u2019s rise. Indie theaters host packed repertory screenings, with audiences at some theaters skewing younger than usual; in one Colorado theater, a chalkboard has been set up for people to share their Letterboxd handles. According to Edo Choi, a film programmer at Metrograph, a repertory theater in Lower Manhattan, audiences have a seemingly inexhaustible appetite for the works of difficult but prestigious directors like Andrei Tarkovsky or Edward Yang.<\/p>\n
All this is to say that an active, evolving culture around movies exists that can be grown, if studios can let go of some of their old ideas about what will motivate audiences to show up. Letterboxd is doing the work of cultivating a younger generation of moviegoers, pushing them to define the taste and values that fuel their consumption; a cinephile renaissance means more people might be willing, for example, to see an important movie in multiple formats \u2014 IMAX, VistaVision, 70 millimeter \u2014 generating greater profit from the same audience. Engaging with these platforms, where users are actively seeking out new films to fall in love with, updates a marketing playbook that hasn\u2019t changed significantly since the 2000s, when studios first embraced the digital landscape.<\/p>\n
Alexandra Kleeman is a contributing writer for the magazine. She is the author, most recently, of the novel \u201cSomething New Under the Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cLa La Land,\u201d Lionsgate. \u201cI\u2019m Thinking of Ending Things,\u201d \u201cMarriage Story,\u201d Netflix. \u201cOne Battle After Another,\u201d \u201cSinners,\u201d \u201cWeapons,\u201d Warner Bros. Pictures. \u201cPulp Fiction,\u201d Miramax Films. \u201cCure,\u201d \u201cHarakiri,\u201d Shochiku. \u201cGospel According to Harry,\u201d Kino Lorber. \u201cS\u00e1t\u00e1ntang\u00f3,\u201d Arbelos Films. \u201cEverything Everywhere All at Once,\u201d \u201cThe Lighthouse,\u201d A24. \u201cButch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,\u201d \u201cThe Sound of Music,\u201d 20th Century Fox. \u201c127 Hours,\u201d Fox Searchlight Pictures. \u201cPuss In Boots: The Last Wish,\u201d Universal Pictures. \u201cMarie Antoinette,\u201d Sony Pictures. \u201cKisapmata,\u201d Bancom Audiovision. \u201cA Confucian Confusion,\u201d Janus Films.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Karl von Randow and Matthew Buchanan created Letterboxd in 2011, but its popularity ballooned during the pandemic. It…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":272895,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[141626,141624,146,85,46,141623,397,141625,117320],"class_list":["post-272894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-andrei","tag-edward","tag-entertainment","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-letterboxd-ltd","tag-movies","tag-tarkovsky","tag-yang"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=272894"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/272894\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/272895"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=272894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=272894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=272894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}