Netflix, Sony and Paramount Circle Letterboxd

There is a small ritual that millions of people perform with the same hand they use to switch off the cinema light or pause a film in bed: they open an app, mark a title as watched, hand it half a star or five, and sometimes write a sentence wittier than the film itself. That ritual is called Letterboxd, and it has just become a commodity on the market.

The network, built thirteen years ago by two New Zealanders, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, now counts more than thirty million users and is in many ways the last corner of the internet where film is discussed with genuine passion rather than through an algorithmically arranged feed. Now, according to reports in the American press, the very companies whose products that audience rates every day are gathering around it.

From a cinephile’s diary to a target for the studios

The sale process is being run by investment bank LionTree, and the names among the interested parties show how much the stakes have risen: Netflix, Sony Pictures, Paramount, the investment firm TPG and Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit. The sought valuation sits at around 250 million dollars.

To grasp the weight of that figure, it helps to go back to 2023, when the Canadian company Tiny bought sixty percent of Letterboxd at a valuation of roughly 50 million dollars. If the current numbers hold, that is a fivefold jump in value in just three years, which is less a story about film and more one about how much the attention of people who take film seriously is worth.

It is worth lowering the temperature straight away. From what has leaked so far, these are not serious acquisition negotiations but early meetings, the phase in which the ground is tested and the appetite measured. The founders, it should be noted, still hold the remaining share, so any outcome depends on their will too, not only on the depth of someone else’s pockets.

What does a network lose when its judge buys it?

Here begins the part that rightly worries Letterboxd users. The platform’s value lies not in its technology, which is modest, but in its tone: in the fact that a three-word review can sink a blockbuster, and that no one above the user decides what is worth watching. Now imagine that network bought by a studio that sends a dozen of its own films into that same arena every year.

It need not spell disaster. An owner can be quiet and let the community breathe, since that very independence is the asset being paid for. But the history of digital communities that passed into the hands of big players is rarely cheerful: recommendations begin to tilt imperceptibly, sponsored titles slip in among the organic ratings, and trust, once chipped, is not bought back.

For now Letterboxd remains what it has always been, a place where film is loved out loud and without permission. The open question is not how much it is worth, but how much of that worth would survive if a film-rating platform passed to someone with an obvious interest in good ratings. Would you place the same trust in a half-star if you knew whose logo sat at the bottom of the screen?