Go back 10 years, and the word “Letterboxd” would have read simply as a typo – unless you were a particularly online film nerd, that is. When Kiwi web designers Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow set out, in 2011, to launch a new website for cataloguing and sharing your personal movie-watching history, its initial userbase was a small, devout tribe of scattered cinephiles. By the start of this year, this base had swelled to 17 million, having ballooned in popularity during the pandemic (In March 2020, that figure was still at 1.8 million). Among their ranks are a host of A-list celebrities – from Charli XCX to Martin Scorsese to Ed Sheeran – and a disproportionate contingent of Generation Z; the platform once envisioned as cinema’s answer to Goodreads is becoming a redoubtable force in the shaping of film culture’s future.
There are those who see Letterboxd – and its stats-centric, somewhat performative approach to 21st-century movie-watching – as a bad thing. It’s true, to some extent, that the app “gameifies” engagement with the art form, reducing it, for some people, to the same sort of clout-chasing brand building that can be found on sites such as Instagram and TikTok. But it would be imprudent to dismiss the benefits of Letterboxd. The app has risen to prominence at a time when the industry is in widespread panic that going to the cinema, as a hobby, is in an unstoppable decline. Younger people in particular are more likely to eschew the big screen in favour of staying home and streaming. Letterboxd – a communal celebration of cinema purism – may be a key way of securing the medium’s survival.
