Letterboxd lifts the indie box office

The Future. Film-focused social platform Letterboxd has quickly become the internet’s home for cinephiles and is now cementing itself as a major player in film marketing. With the platform starting to alert users when movies are releasing in different theatrical markets (and on which streamers), it may become a key in making sure audiences show up to watch an obscure movie as soon as it releases.

For the list lovers
Letterboxd is the social platform for film lovers, and Deadline has the receipts.

• The New Zealand-based social platform has 6.5 million members, with 40-50% in North America.
• It has 4.4 million monthly visitors and 800 million monthly page views, showing that users are very engaged.
• Users have listed over 1 billion movies they’ve seen, put 300 million on their watchlists, and have written 76.8 million reviews… and some are truly unhinged.

And in what is increasingly a rarity in the modern tech world, Letterboxd has been profitable since 2019… all while only having nine employees.

Something for everyone
Now film distributors, especially in the indie space, have caught on that their marketing dollars may be best spent on a platform where users are always looking for the next thing to watch.

• Users already make super-targeted lists of movies that go together, like “Time travel films where the protagonist ends up either having to kill themselves or go right back to the start again, stopping the movie from ever actually happening.”
• Letterboxd, which has already worked with distributors like IFC Films and Utopia, says it can target campaigns to where a film is opening, invite users to include films on their lists, and promote movies through email and socials.

The first film that Letterboxd officially ever helped out was Parasite for the distributor Neon back in 2020… and that movie eventually became a box office success and won Best Picture, anecdotally in large part because of how the film community rallied around it.