Is Letterboxd Becoming a Blockbuster?

Early final decade, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, internet designers primarily based in Auckland, New Zealand, had been searching for a ardour venture. Their enterprise, a boutique internet design studio known as Cactuslab, developed apps and web sites for numerous purchasers, however they needed a venture of their very own that their group might plug away at when there wasn’t a lot else to do.

Buchanan had an concept for a social media website about motion pictures. On the time, he mirrored, he used Flickr to share pictures and Final.fm to share his style in music. IMDb was a database; it wasn’t, in essence, social. That left a spot within the area. The consequence was an app and social media community known as Letterboxd, which its web site describes, aptly, as “Goodreads for movie.”

After it was launched on the internet convention Brooklyn Beta within the fall of 2011, Letterboxd steadily developed a modest however passionate following of movie followers keen to trace their movie-watching habits, create lists of favorites, and write and publish critiques. In 2020, nonetheless, the positioning’s development was explosive. Letterboxd has seen its consumer base almost double for the reason that starting of the pandemic: They now have greater than 3 million member accounts, based on the corporate, up from 1.7 million right now final yr.

And it’s not simply extra customers. It’s extra use: “We’ve seen extra exercise per member,” Buchanan mentioned in a latest Zoom interview. “Our metrics are up throughout the board.” Their revenues have elevated, from promoting and optionally available paid memberships, which give customers added options. The corporate is now not simply Buchanan and von Randow’s aspect venture, and over the past yr, they’ve introduced on a number of full-time employees.

The pandemic has ravaged the film trade, as theaters have remained largely shuttered and high-profile would-be blockbusters like “Tenet” have drastically underperformed. However for Letterboxd, all that point at residence has been a boon. “We love speaking about motion pictures,” mentioned Gemma Gracewood, Letterboxd’s editor in chief. “And we’re speaking much more about what we love currently as a result of we’re all caught indoors.”

At first, Letterboxd primarily attracted movie obsessives: hard-core cinephiles, stats fanatics {and professional} critics seeking to home their printed work beneath one roof. Mike D’Angelo, a longtime contributor to Leisure Weekly and Esquire, used Letterboxd to retroactively log each film he has seen, by date, since January 1992. Along with importing his outdated critiques to the platform, he makes use of the positioning as a sort of diary for extra off-the-cuff musings.

“If I’m writing an expert evaluation, I’m writing for a basic viewers,” he mentioned in a latest telephone name. “Whereas on Letterboxd, I don’t fear about professional forma issues like plot synopsis. I make jokes and references you would need to have a reasonably deep movie data to know. I discover it rather more liberating.”

That freedom offers writing on Letterboxd a sort of wild-west high quality. What rises to the highest of the positioning’s web page for hottest critiques ranges wildly: There are obscure memes, diaristic essays and sprawling screeds full of pseudo-academic jargon. You would possibly discover political disquisitions written with breathless zeal: “As probably the most damaging motion on the planet, because the supply of extra battle, demise, and exploitation than something this world has identified since chattel slavery was born, imperialism is the very best, most vile, most horrifying side of capitalism, and we oppose it.” (That’s, after all, a evaluation of “Surprise Girl.”) Otherwise you would possibly discover a single cryptic sentence, resembling one of many website’s hottest critiques of the film “Joker”: “This occurred to my buddy Eric.”

The unedited, anything-goes spirit of Letterboxd could be off-putting: D’Angelo confessed he finds it “maddening” when writers “use all lowercase” or refuse “to make use of regular grammar or punctuation,” which on the positioning is commonly. However the lack of guidelines or construction may result in some fascinating, unconventional criticism, and affords a platform to voices which may in any other case not be heard. On Letterboxd, you may uncover not solely new motion pictures to observe, however new critics to comply with.

Sydney Wegner, a single mom in rural Texas, began utilizing Letterboxd in late 2012. Beneath the username @campbart, she has written vivid, free-form critiques (nearly solely in lowercase) of sci-fi, horror and motion motion pictures, together with a heartfelt piece about “Minions” that reads like a poetic ode to her daughter. “I wrote that method as a result of that’s what I wish to learn,” she mentioned not too long ago. “I discover criticism very boring until there’s a private side to it.”

Wegner mentioned she “by no means meant to jot down professionally,” however as her account started to realize followers, she quickly discovered herself fielding requests for paid work as a critic. She has appeared as a visitor on movie podcasts, performed introductions for movie screenings and been commissioned by editors at a number of movie evaluation web sites, resembling Movie Freak Central.

Lucy Could joined Letterboxd in 2015, and in the present day she is one in every of its hottest customers, with almost 60,000 followers. The 26-year-old lives together with her household in her hometown in Illinois, the place she works at a movie show, and in her spare time watches motion pictures and writes about them at size on Letterboxd.

Though Could mentioned she is “at the start a fan of movie,” and never an expert, she however now considers herself a critic. “I’d name myself a Letterboxd-era critic,” she mentioned. She finds this “fashionable wave of criticism” on Letterboxd fascinating, “as a result of loads of the outdated guidelines are being thrown out the window.”

“There’s now much less disgrace when decrease scores are handed out to acclaimed older movies, and there’s extra like to go round for issues like rom-coms,” she mentioned. “I discover that honesty on Letterboxd fascinating. I didn’t go to highschool for writing or something like that, however I do name myself a critic in that sense.”

Letterboxd’s explosion in development is certainly trending younger. On the app, which the corporate stories is how 75 % of customers entry Letterboxd, the biggest demographic is 18- to 24-year-olds. “There’s been an infinite development in youthful members,” Greenwood mentioned. And she or he mentioned that when drawn to the platform, these youthful members usually quickly discover their tastes beginning to evolve. “They’re approaching having watched ‘The Princess Change: Switched Once more’ and discovering ‘The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,’” she mentioned.

That shift towards a youthful consumer base means Letterboxd is lastly beginning to increase outdoors the hard-core movie-buff area of interest — and the greater than 1,000,000 new customers in 2020 symbolize lots of people “who aren’t strictly cinephiles,” Buchanan defined. The expansion has introduced the platform to a brand new stage of success, and Buchanan sees even larger potential. “There are tens of thousands and thousands of Netflix customers, as an illustration. We all know we’re not going to enchantment to each single Netflix consumer, however we additionally know that the urge for food for movie content material is rising.”

The surge in development means that whereas the movie trade has in some ways been devastated by lockdown orders and the scourge of the pandemic, movie tradition itself remains to be thriving. We could not be capable of go to the flicks, however because the success of Letterboxd reveals, we nonetheless wish to discuss them.