Don't Sell Letterboxd to Comcast. Sell It to the Fans.
Letterboxd is for sale? Amaze. Amaze. Amaze. While rumors swirl that it may get acquired by a media conglomerate, a streaming platform, a movie theater chain, or maybe a wealthy benefactor, to me it’s obvious as f*ck that it should be run as a cooperative akin to REI. Let’s talk it out.
What We Know
Max Tani at Semafor reported that Tiny is trying to flip their stake in Letterboxd. Makes sense as I never fully understood what those folks in British Columbia were trying to do with New Zealand’s Letterboxd outside of maybe sell some partnerships and grow the social audience.
Sidebar: Are you unfamiliar with Letterboxd? And you’re reading this? Okay! Cool. I highly recommend reading Scott Tobias’s 2020 Ringer profile of the app.
What We’re Seeing
Lots of smart and well meaning tech bros (and tech adjacent bros) are tweeting out “who wants to go in with me” as it’s obvious Letterboxd could be so much more. It’s a shaggy app with confusing organization, minimal onboarding, nascent optimization, and <insert other buzzwords>. TBH a semi-competent team of 3 with access to Claude could do a ton of great work “plucking low hanging fruit” for at least one year. You can see the Fast Company interviews where they talk about how they supercharged the "undermonetized social graph” and whatnot.
Bleh. That does little to excite me. Letterboxd isn’t Goodreads or Strava. It’s an app built from a team that ran a film festival. It’s independent like your favorite local rep movie theater (shout out Music Box in Chicago).
Like I want the app to be better but tbh it’s an app to log movies, find criticism and takes, and discover new things to watch. It’s not rocket science. It’s more fun than looking at a spreadsheet or scanning subreddits.
My hunch is that someone within tech will purchase the app and try to polish it and help it grow up to be a better “marketing platform” for studios, distributors, exhibitors, and even streamers.
What I’m Proposing
Let’s go full Park Slope Coop! Well… let’s go REI at least. Sell Letterboxd to its paying members. Letterboxd should be owned by the fans.
The value of Letterboxd is not the technology. It was never some fancy tech company and in a world of LLM software development, there’s no technological moat to this type of product. Anyone can build a slightly better version of Letterboxd on their own now.
The value of Letterboxd is the culture it’s both tapped into and helped cultivate (or at least shape). Letterboxd is credible because it’s independent, shaggy, and totally open. Letterboxd works because it feels like an actual third place for film fans. When you go see Project Hail Mary on 70mm or a screening of Broadcast News on a Tuesday night, you know that other people in the theater are going to log this experience on Letterboxd just like you. That’s kinda magical. Dare I say, it’s cool in a nerdy and slightly obnoxious sort of way.
That’s the value worth preserving and the moment they sell, it’s probably gone. It won’t disappear overnight, but it’ll erode faster than we think. That’s just how it happens.
Here’s the idea. Letterboxd converts to a cooperative. Members buy in to become part-owners. Not shareholders in the Wall Street sense, but members in the REI sense. Elect a board, the whole thing. Heck, the drama of running Letterboxd will be part of the fun of being a member. I want to hear Blank Check or the Big Pic talking about it. Heck I want them to run!
My Dream: the Letterboxd Fund
What if membership didn’t just mean owning a piece of the app? What if it meant owning a piece of a broader mission to grow film culture and specifically, to grow the experience of watching movies in a room full of strangers?
The box office is complicated right now (I still need to listen to Derek Thompson and Sean talk about this – what, I have a 6 month old!), but something interesting is happening behind the projector. Rep theaters are filling up. Gen Z is going to the movies to see both new releases and to catch Alien at the Music Box, or Heat at the Alamo Drafthouse, or some restored print of a 1972 film they found in a Letterboxd list. Big format is booming. IMAX is selling out. The experience of going to a movie theater and *feeling* it with an audience is having a moment.
Letterboxd is already the social layer for that behavior. When you see something at a rep screening and log it that night, you're not just tracking a watch, you're signaling that this experience is something you value. The app is already the community glue.
So what if Letterboxd membership came with a stake in a fund that invested in exactly that? A fund that seeds new independent theaters, shores up existing ones, maybe even helps a beloved local cinema survive a bad year. Not MoviePass. That was a discount scheme with no theory of value.
Being a Letterboxd member could feel like being a member of every great independent movie theater in every city in the world. You walk into the Brattle in Cambridge, or the Music Box here in Chicago, or the Roxie in San Francisco, and you feel some ownership over the fact that it exists. You helped keep it alive. That’s a different relationship to a subscription than “I get 15% off at Regal.”
You Still Here?
The people who use Letterboxd should own it. Not because it would be pure, but because it would work. The whole point of a co-op is that the interests of the institution and the interests of the members are structurally aligned. That alignment is what Letterboxd needs more than it needs a media parent or a growth strategy or a streaming integration.
Who’s already in?