Can the Letterboxd Video Store Save Us from Corporate Media?

Here's a possible tagline: "Looks good and algorithm-free!"

In 2024, I asked Letterboxd co-founder Matthew Buchanan about whether the company might venture into film distribution (for this Filmmaker Magazine article). He seemed open to it. “We’re always considering new ways to connect our audiences with the films they want to see,” he said. “We wouldn’t rule out other methods of distribution in the future.”

A year and half later, here we are: Letterboxd is launching a new streaming service, the Letterboxd Video Store, next month (now live here). First announced at Cannes earlier this year, the new rental platform is a potential gamechanger for a corporate-dominated streaming industry that has increasingly squeezed out indie films.

As I wrote last year, “There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, ‘They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.’ And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity.”

The financial details of the Letterboxd Video Store have yet to be made available: How are they licensing the films? For how much money? For how long? Are they taking exclusive or nonexclusive rights? Will they be geoblocking territories, or will films be streamed for the world? What kind of percentage cut will filmmakers receive from the revenue? That’s a lot of questions! But the mission of the platform appears to align with all of the things that indie industry players have been calling and yearning for—including me, in this widely read November 2024 piece “A Netflix for Indie Films and Documentaries”—for some time.

According to Letterboxd, the platform will satisfy the much-desired need for a more curated list of titles (not the popular mid content that often fills Netflix’s Top Ten), but “curated shelves” including “festival standouts that are yet to be distributed”; “long-watchlisted titles finally made available”; “restorations and rediscoveries worth celebrating”; and “limited-time drops of sneak peeks and unreleased gems (only here for a short time).”

Sounds pretty good, right? And with no subscription fees (sorry MUBI, Criterion, FilmStruck), there is no barrier to entry, which should allow for audiences to take more risks on watching Letterboxd favorites—some of the currently highest-rated Letterboxd films include a ‘60s Japanese samurai flick called “Harakiri,” the Palestinian Oscar-winner “No Other Land,” and Damien Chazelle’s early feature “Whiplash.”

And what indie industry leaders love about Letterboxd is that the recommendations and buzz on the site are organic and user-generated. As Magnolia Pictures’s head of distribution and marketing Neal Block told me, “You’re reaching a very specific audience segment that Meta often struggles to find, and reaching them cost-effectively,” he added, referring specifically to “a young, diverse, cinema-literate, and—most important—enthusiastic audience.”

If it works, the Letterboxd Video Store couldn’t come a moment too soon. As I’ve become more worried about recently, unchecked corporate media consolidation and monopolization is increasing at an alarming rate during the Trump no-laws era, and if Warner Bros Discovery gets subsumed into Netflix, or worse, into the new right-wing Paramount sphere of influence, audiences will have less choices on what they can watch and where, and more power will be concentrated in even the fewer.

When it comes to American Democracy (and bear with me, these things are linked), the freedom of media and information are perhaps the most fundamental to its survival. When I find myself going to the darkest of places and doomscrolling about our world’s future, I just remember the A.I. generated Trump PSA from “South Park”’s debut episode this summer (launched on Paramount+ of all places!) or the blockbuster success of the anti-white-supremacist “Sinners” (released by, yes, Warner Bros!), or the hundreds of grassroots artist-organized Fall of Freedom events flourishing across the U.S. this weekend, and I remember that we don’t live in China… yet.

While the Trump Administration is certainly a threat to our free media marketplace of ideas (and they did manage to hamstring public media in profound ways), I’m just as concerned, if not more so, about media and tech corporations’ shameless lust to work closely with the Trump Administration to take advantage of our deregulatory moment and consolidate their own power and wealth and control along with him. Edgar Wright’s new remake of “The Running Man” doesn’t do nearly enough to skewer its fictional authoritarian state where government and media are a single fascist entity, but you get the idea.

Okay, so maybe I digress. Back to the Letterboxd Video Store! If the streaming site remains true to its identity, and if they are able to harness the power of their movie fans, independent films will not just have a place they can be discovered and disseminated, but most importantly, it will be on a scale that allows for sustainability. The “scale” problem is the main problem that has dogged so many efforts before it (“Scale” is the title of the last chapter in my book with Ted Hope for a reason), with many previous indie-friendly efforts to stream films online never able to find enough of an audience.

But according to Letterboxd, it now has some 20 million users worldwide, which would make it roughly on par with MUBI. (According to SEO traffic monitor Ahrefs.com, Letterboxd actually has nearly twice as much web traffic, 8.9 million to MUBI’s 4.8 million.) While it’s difficult to say how many of Letterboxd’s users will pay money to stream a movie, the platform has the potential to buoy a transactional-video-on-demand market that has been dwindling with the dominance of the big subscription-video-on-demand services (which, as I’ve mentioned before, have shown little desire to support indie films recently). Even having access to one million new consumers is a sizable amount.

Without all of the details of Letterboxd’s effort, my praise may be premature, but depending on the size, scale, and there’s also questions about the basic interface and technology of how the films are shown, the Video Store could finally be just the right online home for indie films, where millions already gather to celebrate and discuss cinema in a way that exists—so far, at least—outside of corporate influence and algorithms. (How long before Netflix tries to buy it?)

As Kyle Greenberg, head of marketing and distribution at Utopia, told me last year, “It’s incredibly refreshing and important to have a platform such as Letterboxd that democratizes the conversation around film.”