I think opening a Letterboxd account was a landmark moment in my life. Yes, sure, you could always leave ratings on IMDb or elsewhere, and even see what your friends were doing, but it was hard to find a site full of movie buffs that was genuinely fun online before it was created. Of course, we can’t have anything nice, so there are already several streaming services trying to buy it. Anyway.
Cinema is over
As reported today, Letterboxd is deep in a sale process that isn’t exactly short of suitors: Sony, Paramount, and Netflix have already made their initial offers, raising a whole host of questions: Will users’ ratings really be free if a streaming service is paying for the app? What benefits could Paramount, for example, get from having a movie-reviewing app?
And you may be wondering, how much could this cost? Well, right now it belongs to Tiny, a Canadian company that in 2023 bought 60% of it for $50 million. It’s not at all clear that movie buffs all over the world are going to go along with it and allow, without any issues, their app for rating movies and being smart-asses to belong to a corporate giant (although, on the other hand, IMDb belongs to Amazon, so, who knows?).
Really, we should calm down: people have been talking for years about the possible purchase of Letterboxd, and so far absolutely nothing has happened. The app is still the same, the terrible puns are still the same, the arrogance is still the same. Everything we want from our favorite movie app, right?
