A Sad Day to Be a Letterboxd User
After 7 years of being a consistent user, the highest for any platform I have ever used, I am really unhappy about the recent news that Netflix, Sony Pictures, and Paramount are all bidding to acquire Letterboxd. While my love for that app is undeniable, as it helped me a lot with discovering films that perhaps I could not find anywhere else, and I met truly interesting people with great taste in cinema, I can see the future of post-Amazon acquisition Goodreads for Letterboxd if it ends up with any of those immaculately evil companies. Truth be told, I can expect a much worse fate for Letterboxd considering how much larger the movie industry is compared to books, and also all those three companies can directly benefit from containing the most popular cinema-oriented app that can aid them not only in manipulating the discourse surrounding their products, but also use that data to shift strategic investments to different sectors of the enterprise. Netflix movies, for instance, usually get lower ratings in Letterboxd due to the more snobbish and "cinephilic" user community of the app, something that I believe is frankly good for the cinema as you can notice the success of Obsession and Backrooms in the last year was partially related to the positive word of mouth that was spreading from the discourse on Letterboxd and Twitter, in contrast with many recent Netflix slops. Now imagine Netflix buys out Letterboxd and Red Notice 2 with outstanding performances from Gal Gadot and Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson, somehow gets a higher score than every cinephile’s favorite Citizen Kane. While life is definitely unpredictable and there is an alternative universe in which Mr. Rock is a better actor than Orson Welles and Al Pacino combined, I am not totally convinced that is possible in our world without some support from Netflix's influence among the higher-ups in the movie-critic society. Rotten Tomatoes is my least favorite movie app just because all the movies generally have good ratings, since the process of the final score is not simply averaging all the scores, but the ratio of "positive ratings" to "negative ratings," where a 100 and a 60 have the same weight, and I wonder what can be more stupid than that. Yet, many Disney outputs post their RT rating and honor it to fabricate a positive narrative about their critical success, so the audience pays for the newest tedious live-action they came up with.
I was chatting with Noa last month about the long-term commercial plans of Letterboxd, as the app is reaching more and more members and a peak in popularity that no other similar app has ever experienced. I am not a huge fan of gatekeeping when it comes to things I appreciate and enjoy. I always wish more people would start a Letterboxd account, as I think the community there is not as toxic as Twitter or Instagram, and the nicher the platform is, the more interesting the users can get in my view, at least in the case of cinema and books. However, I think keeping a huge community in Letterboxd is costing the owners more money, and I am not sure what percent of the users are paid members, as the app's paid options mostly operate in Europe and the US, something that created controversy back in the late 2025 when they introduced the movie rental branch that was not working for south asian countries, while having hidden gems from their cinemas. During that conversation, as I highlighted there is no problem with Letterboxd adding ads to increase the monetization as long as they do not invest in generative AI, or ask you to watch a 10 seconds ad to read a review like YouTube and Instagram, and while I stand behind my words, I might need to add a new article that includes not selling out to a big name that will directly exploit the platform for marketing their garbage. Even though I am still not certain how they will avoid this, I hope they do not repeat the same mistakes as A24 and other brands that used to be popular among cinephiles and nowadays are making the most disappointing efforts to demolish their good reputation.