Speaking of the Letterboxd Video Store, that newly launched initiative to help independent movies find audiences may also be unplugged, because how would it benefit a studio to rent and sell movies it doesn’t already own and distribute? Using its list feature, Letterboxd has created ready-to-rent recommendation round-ups from filmmakers like Richard Linklater and new-to-digital releases like The Currents, Camp, and The Python Hunt, easily curated for hungry cinephiles who may have read about these films on The A.V. Club and found them hard to find in the theater. These lists could instead be manipulated or weighted towards a single company’s output if a sale were to go through to an owner with a conflict of interest.
The same goes for the platform’s independent curation, which includes its editorial arm and zippy red carpet social videos where celebrities share their top four favorite films. Letterboxd Journal is currently offering 20 recommendations of summer movies dating back to the 1950s, a list of rerelease highlights, and a deep appreciation of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. But there’s no incentive to fund an entire publication with its own editors and hosts when that same wing of the company can become marketing, the way Netflix’s Tudum serves as an in-house promotional magazine.
As with the boondoggle of MoviePass, one of the selling points for Letterboxd as an app is the data it’s collected from the platform’s millions of users, many of whom log hundreds of films in a given year. How useful or representative that data is, well, that’s unclear. As with MoviePass—which offered tickets to movie theaters for a flat fee in the days before AMC Stubs membership—this is data from a highly engaged group. But it’s still tantalizing for a studio that may want to experiment with how it makes production or marketing decisions targeted towards younger cinephiles.
What has made Letterboxd so successful is that it fosters more conversations about movies, beyond just what’s in theaters in a given week, without an agenda. It’s a place for both dissenting and supportive opinions, a place for people to discover other like-minded movie fans and contrarians, and get a sense of what their tastes are. The “four favorites” question isn’t just for red carpets, it’s seeped into American film culture at large. At a time when Hollywood instability is inescapable, and a merger looks to shake the studio landscape even more intensely, this odd, hyperobsessive corner of the internet has been a safe area. That it may also be up for sale, to the same crumbling powers in charge of everything else, feels destabilizing. A new tech-company overlord may not be the answer, as we saw with the enshittification of Twitter, but a studio—any studio—that buys up Letterboxd will be purchasing the mistrust of users burned by data collection schemes and favoritism before as they watch the website where they once found friends (and maybe a few enemies) become little more than marketing.
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