Letterboxd Is Up for Sale. Say Goodbye to Fun.

3 min readThe show is over, folks. Like MoviePass and old Twitter before it, the days of using an app purely for enjoyment will soon be ripped from our hands and morphed into something we barely even recognize by our corporate overlords. According to Deadline, A24, Sony, and The New York Times have expressed interest in purchasing Letterboxd—the free social media platform for film discovery and user reviews.Say goodbye to cutesy reviews of The Odyssey like, “RIP Odysseus you definitely would’ve loved Google Maps.” Wave farewell to specific, curated user lists titled “Films in which Rachel McAdams’s character is romantically involved with a time traveler.” You will no longer laugh out loud when you find out that there are somehow four (!) movies on that list—About Time, Doctor Strange, Midnight in Paris, and The Time Traveler’s Wife—because whoever buys Letterboxd is surely spending the reported $300 million offer to then turn a profit, which will require turning the platform into something Letterboxd users may no longer want to use.News of Letterboxd’s sale ramped up this week after Canadian private equity firm Tiny, which purchased 60% of Letterboxd for around $60 million four years ago, announced that it was now looking to sell. Letterboxd founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow still control a minority stake and will ultimately decide which company becomes Letterboxd’s new owner, but there’s no telling what the future direction of Letterboxd looks like for now.Under A24 or Sony’s management, the film production companies would need to take extra care to avoid claims of conflicts of interest. Letterboxd’s base of roughly 30 million monthly users aged 18-24, per Deadline, generally rate A24 pictures highly—but would A24 allow its own platform to spread negative reviews?At the same time, The New York Times presents a different problem. Letterboxd currently employs writers, reviewers, and even red-carpet reporters on its own platform. (You may have heard the popular red-carpet question, in which actors must name four of their favorite films of all time.) Would a purchase from The New York Times mean that Letterboxd would become something like The Athletic or Wirecutter, or would we see all of Letterboxd’s fantastic freelance journalism replaced by New York Times staffers? Or worse… will we have to pay to use Letterboxd?!Part of the beauty of Letterboxd was that it fostered conversations about films without a secondary agenda. It’s created engagement from a devoted audience of film lovers purely out of that fandom, and Letterboxd has rarely ever asked for anything more out of its users. Of course, there are paid subscription options that allow users to customize their profiles and receive personalized stat-tracking. Plus, there is now a Letterboxd video store where users can rent and stream a list of curated films on demand much like they can on Amazon or Apple TV. But it’s always felt in service of its veracious audience. To lead us to a new film and nothing more. Right now, director Richard Linklater’s favorite films from the French New Wave are up for rent on the Letterboxd Video Store.That’s the exact kind of niche attention and specificity that we could lose once Letterboxd is sold. I could be wrong. We might see a “Richard Linklater names his favorite French New Wave films” article on nytimes.com/letterboxd someday. And if that’s the case, you can come right back here and rub my nose in it! I’d love that future, because it would mean that we’re still on Letterboxd.But much like one of my favorite Letterboxd user lists of all time, “Movies in which a highly respected auteur filmmaker processed their real-life divorce by depicting Scarlett Johansson in a deteriorating relationship with a man who is a content creator of some kind”—Marriage Story, Her, and Lost in Translation—I don’t think this story has a happy ending either.