Letterboxd—the internet’s number one destination for finding out which old movie Martin Scorsese has been watching lately, while also observing your peers attempt to out-do each other by boiling their favorite films down via heavily slangified haiku—is now attempting to go from being a place where you just write about movies to one where you can watch them, too. Specifically, the social cataloguing service announced this week that it’ll soon be licensing digital movies for online rental, essentially bolting a video store onto its existing structure.
We’ll be honest: Our brains start instinctively playing the “Uma Thurman just saw a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad” sirens any time a previously free service starts finding ways to sell us stuff, so our initial reaction to this news was both knee-jerk and negative. That being said—and after reading Letterboxd’s explanation for what it’s hoping to do in this space—it is possible to see some sense in the move. The company (which got bought by Canadian investment firm Tiny back in 2023) does, after all, have huge amounts of data about what movies its users are genuinely interested in, including easily harvested access to more than 20 million people’s watchlists. Ignoring the ever-pleasant sensation of being reminded that we’re really all just loose assemblages of data with an inconvenient human attached to them, the company is promising to use all that information as one of its guiding lights when it decides which films to license for rental. (“Every film is chosen because members want to watch it, not just because it’s easy to license.”) Given how random and dire the average streaming library can feel these days, there’s something exciting about seeing one purportedly guided by actual enthusiasm.
Along with promising to get early rentals for films making the festival rounds, as well as “restorations and revivals,” the rental service is clearly aiming at the Criterion Channel/MUBI space in terms of targeting die-hard film lovers, with the added bonus that users browsing reviews of some interesting and obscure title their friend just talked up will hypothetically be able to hit a button, pay a bit of money, and watch it themselves. Of course, since Letterboxd is not talking price yet—except to say it’ll “depend on your location”—it’s not clear how well either the economics, or the actual catalog, will live up to the hype.
The Letterboxd Video Store is expected to launch in early December.
