Letterboxd’s Sale to the New York Times: 9 Pros, Cons, and Big Questions From the $330 Million Deal

After several months of business talks and speculation, Letterboxd is about to have new owners. The New York Times is closing in on deal to acquire the film-logging social media platform, which values the company at $330 million. It’s an eye-popping increase from 2023, when the Canadian holding company Tiny bought a majority stake at a $50 million valuation. Far beyond the film industry, there is a dismal track record and daunting uncertainty when it comes to companies’ ability to maintain their identities after being acquired. Social media reception to the pending New York Times deal generally peaked at resigned relief (“the best case scenario” was a common refrain) while also drawing more cynical, even existential responses about the future of Letterboxd. As the website’s user base holds its breath over the future, these are some pros, cons, and big unknowns to consider about where Letterboxd is going. PRO: Hey, at Least a Studio Didn’t Buy It There’s understandably a lot of negative social chatter about the news of Letterboxd’s looming acquisition, but let’s rest assured that it’s at least not a studio taking ownership of the wildly popular cinephile engagement platform. A24, Sony, Netflix, and Skydance were all reported to have registered talks about an acquisition. Whether or not this new iteration of Letterboxd will exist behind a paywall is one matter, but that’s not the worst thing compared to the potential studio-ification (i.e. A24-ification, as they were in talks for the sale) of the brand. Compare it to studios running an exhibition chain — not just Sony purchasing Alamo Drafthouse, but all the way back to the days before the Paramount Decrees, which legislatively blocked studios from having a monopoly on theaters. (Decrees that are no longer in effect.) In that situation, there’s more potential for marketing nepotism and favoritism to titles and properties in-house. A media company taking over Letterboxd should, in theory, prevent the kind of self-interest that threatens independence. —Ryan Lattanzio CON: Letterboxd Users May Not Trust the Times With Their Community A deal would bring two unusually loaded cultural conversations under one roof. The movie-logging platform has helped reshape the world’s repertory film scene — effectively gamifying the enjoyment of archival art — while debates about the Times often wind their way back to the paper’s coverage of Palestine and trans rights. For Letterboxd users who see that coverage as having real consequences for whose lives and experiences are taken seriously by mainstream journalistic institutions, the prospect of the Times owning a community they helped build raises questions of trust. A bigger audience would be a genuine upside, but for some users, who owns the room is an existential issue. —Alison Foreman UNKNOWN: The Fate of Letterboxd Journal and Changes to the New York Times Culture Desk While some users might not even know about Letterboxd’s digital magazine, the Journal has been a growing presence on the platform, with a staffed editorial team regularly publishing interviews, retrospective considerations, film festival coverage, and other longform articles. The question remains on how, or if, those writers and editors will be integrated into the New York Times newsroom. A shuttering of the Journal would wreck yet another publication for professional film coverage and freelance opportunities, of which there are fewer and fewer. On the other hand, when the New York Times bought The Athletic in 2022 for a whopping $550 million, the banner initially continued as a semi-independent banner. But a year later, the Times dissolved its existing sports department, laying off or reassigning staff, and positioned The Athletic as a replacement. The New York Times’ culture desk has not been immune to shake-ups over recent years; the potential addition of Letterboxd begs the question of whether further changes are in store. —J. Kim Murphy PRO: Fewer Gremlins in the Server Room As the number of Letterboxd accounts has skyrocketed over the past few years, navigating the platform has become a bumpier experience for users. Pop-up Cloudflare turnstiles reading “Verifying you are human. This may take a few seconds” make frequent interruptions clicking from page to page, while Gremlins-centric error messages signaling server crashes are semi-regular occurrences. The New York Times draws much more web traffic than Letterboxd and such technical hiccups are essentially anomalous. The company certainly has the resources to bolster the strength of Letterboxd’s servers. —JKM CON: Potential Interface Changes for a Userbase Sensitive to Them Letterboxd users have historically been an extremely discerning audience, sensitive to changes that might be seen as minute or inconsequential for other websites. A memorable hiccup from recent years came when the platform abruptly removed an option to list out all star-ratings given by the accounts one follows on a single web page. After some backlash from users (like myself) who noticed the feature’s disappearance, Letterboxd was swift in reintegrating the tool. It was a small crisis with a happy ending, but it speaks to how quickly UI changes can dishearten the platform’s users. If the New York Times wants to make even small tweaks to the platform, or heavily integrate it into its digital ecosystem, it will face an audience that’s quick to rally against such changes. —JKM UNKNOWN: What Does the New York Times Want Letterboxd to Be? The New York Times Company is the poster child for brand elasticity in the digital media age. America’s newspaper of record didn’t just adapt to the Internet; it built an empire of games, recipes, and sports that a sizable chunk of the world needs to engage with in a daily basis. But it’s less apparent how Letterboxd fits into the strategy. The social network exists somewhere between an editorial product and a game and doesn’t have a clear comp within the NYT organization. Is the plan to simply move the entire Letterboxd infrastructure behind the NYT paywall, making the $30 monthly subscription tier even more unavoidable for cinephiles? Draw on users’ data to bolster revenue opportunities for streaming promotions and the Times’ product recommendation banner Wirecutter? The answer might be some combination of the above, but the Times is entering uncharted territory. —Christian Zilko PRO: A Steward That’s Survived Nearly 200 Years The New York Times was first established in 1851. It has weathered the shift to digital media better than just about any other paper. It is one of the few publications that is growing its readership, with paid subscribers last reported at 13.8 million. While Letterboxd has grown its user base significantly, the company has never disclosed the number of accounts that pay for its two subscription tiers. The Times places Letterboxd in a more established ecosystem. The paper’s history of supporting cultural frameworks suggests that it can make the platform, which was only founded in 2011, into an enduring institution. —JKM CON: Social Media Hot Takes and Longform Criticism Under the Same Roof Plenty of filmmakers IndieWire has spoken to are concerned about the widening gap between what defines film criticism and what defines a hot-take social media sound-off, i.e., the “instant reaction.” Reviews on Letterboxd can range from the thoughtful and long-form to the pithy and snarky. As film critic jobs evaporate globally, what happens when you merge Letterboxd closer to the purview of established, institutional film writing, the kind that’s hard, that demands a chunk of your soul? Letterboxd has further democratized criticism, no question, and while many of us argue that we need an elevated discourse, what happens if more people start to think… we don’t? Will the fusion of the Times and Letterboxd stoke that debate, or create harmony? Will this only fuel the growing primacy of influencers over critics and journalists as an authority on a film’s quality? Either way, cantankerous conversation will abound. —RL UNKNOWN: What If Everyone Takes Their Watchlist and Just… Goes Home? It follows then that if enough Letterboxd users distrust the Times, they might log fewer movies, post fewer reviews, or exit the app altogether. From a web-development perspective, the basic mechanics of a movie diary are incredibly easy to replicate. (Hell, AI just cloned Adobe Photoshop.) The hard part is getting the consumers whose aggregate taste is a cultural bellwether to once again show up in the same place. It wouldn’t take a mass exodus for Letterboxd to feel fundamentally different, and if the core group of people who reliably made consumers laugh or put weird repertory picks on your radar stop contributing, there will be fewer reasons to engage. The community could splinter across new competitor sites — which, yes, opens up potential opportunities for aspiring critics to gain exposure and find their followings. But we can’t know if any of that would be as big as the OG Letterboxd. —AF