In a recent interview for her feature directorial debut “The Chronology of Water,” Kristen Stewart was asked to name her four favorite films. She got a little nervous.
“I don’t want to f*ck this up,” she said. “Because this stuff really matters, man!”
It’s hard to tell how facetious Stewart was being here, but there’s a whole lot of truth behind her statement. The question, “What are your four favorite films?” has been growing in popularity since the COVID-19 pandemic, and crafting the perfect top four is a real art form. The question has been asked on red carpets to everyone from members of the rock band Pavement to “Survivor” host Jeff Probst, but it’s not a question solely reserved for celebrities. My boyfriend’s top four are “Black Narcissus,” “Thirst,” “High and Low,” and “Don’t Look Now.” Mine are “The Heartbreak Kid,” (Elaine May, not the Farrelly brothers) “La Collectionneuse,” “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” and “Seconds.”
If you’ve made it this far, you might be asking yourself: Why four? Who cares? What in God’s name are you talking about, Sammie? Well, I’m talking about the little movie social media app that could, of course! I’m talking about Letterboxd.
Letterboxd is a movie-based social media platform where users can log in and review films, create lists of films, view what their friends are watching, and share their top four films with everyone. Think Goodreads, but for movies, and with an infinitely more usable interface.
Initially launched in 2011, as of 2020 Letterboxd had 1.8 million users. By the end of 2023, it had 11.4 million. As 2024 came to a close, the app had 17 million users – and counting.
Letterboxd sends journalists to red carpets. Critics, like myself, use it to share their work and boost their profile. Sean Baker, the filmmaker behind the most recent Best Picture Oscar winner “Anora,” has been active on Letterboxd for years. Stars like Ayo Edebiri, Rachel Sennott, and Bowen Yang count themselves among its users – as does, as of October 2023, acclaimed director Martin Scorsese.
Over the past five years, Letterboxd has been taking over the movie world. But, convincing a legendary 82-year-old director to join its ranks isn’t the most impressive thing the app has achieved in that time. What’s really special about Letterboxd is the way it has managed to create a community around movie-watching – especially among younger film lovers – during a time when it feels more and more like movies are losing their cultural relevance.
“If there is a collective of people that otherwise would be separated with a mutual interest, they can find a sense of community,” said Clay Moores, a student at the Savannah College of Art and Design and a Letterboxd user since 2020.
In late 2023, Variety reported that half of the platform’s active users were under 35 years old, with more than half of that group between the ages of 16 and 24. A spokesperson for Letterboxd said that a recent member survey (sample size: 5,100) from May of 2024 showed that 66 percent of respondents were 34 or younger. Of those respondents, 85.3 percent saw at least one film in the cinema in the past month, and 32 percent had seen 3-5 films in cinemas in the past month.
It might seem incongruous that the swift rise in Letterboxd coincides with the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an event that has left movie theaters in the lurch. But when you consider the shared isolation of that moment, the pieces begin to come together. Letterboxd provided a way to watch movies by yourself, and still connect over those films with a community.
“Without being able to be with people physically, the ability to talk about movies is something that Letterboxd really provided during that time,” SCAD student Logan Slavin said.
Clay and Logan were two of multiple SCAD students I spoke with to try and understand how Letterboxd has affected the movie-viewing lives of younger cinephiles. Logan and his brother, Tanner Slavin, both initially joined Letterboxd around 2017 or 2018, but didn’t really start engaging with the app until after the pandemic. Both said they think the app has opened their eyes to movies they normally wouldn’t consider watching.
For Tanner – who does not consider himself a horror movie guy – “Sinners” is one of those movies. Since its release on April 17, the Ryan Coogler vampire film has earned almost $260 million domestically.
“I look through the app and see what my friends are watching, or what’s really popular. [If] there’s a lot of conversation about certain movies, even if I wouldn’t traditionally be interested in them, I would maybe go check it out,” Tanner said. “That kind of thing broadens my horizons a little bit.”
Logan feels the same way as his brother about the horror genre, but said that Letterboxd has helped him grow out of his movie-watching comfort zone.
“I know there are some [horror movies] that I think I would really like if I sat down and watched them,” Logan said. “I feel like I always watch certain types of movies, and I want to expand past that a bit.”
The beauty of Letterboxd lies in its versatility. You can use the app to be social – see what your friends are watching, like your friends’ reviews, etc. Or, you can be like SCAD student Matt Michaelangelo and use it as a way to keep track of the films you like and push himself to think harder about what you like about them.
“I like to keep track of what films I like – ‘This film is five stars. Why is this film five stars? [Because] I like the visuals,’” Matt said. “For me, it’s like a cohesive reference book.”
There are over half a million movies to sort through on Letterboxd. The algorithm not only shows you what the most popular movies are on the app at any given moment, but also what your friends and people that you follow are watching. There’s also the list feature, which allows users to group movies together in any way they like. There are lists like “10001 Movies You Must See Before You Die,” or “feeling lost in your 20s,” or – one I made, and what I consider my personal masterpiece – “Ben Affleck movies that would be better if all the other characters were muppets.” Whatever you’re interested in cinematically, you can find a home for that interest on Letterboxd.
“The way it has affected how I watch movies is genuinely just what movies I watch,” Clay said. “I think, oddly enough, I watch a lot more less popular, less liked movies. So anything where I have a niche interest, or something that’s a cult classic, I think I’ve found myself a lot more attracted to those as a result of the app.”
One of the most important Letterboxd lists in the lives of some of these SCAD students comes from their professor, Jaime Villa Ruiz. For one of his classes, Ruiz used to share a word document with 222 films he thought would make beneficial viewing for his students. In the fall of 2022, one of his students suggested he used Letterboxd instead.
“This changes everything,” Ruiz said. “It made it so much easier for me to communicate with them.”
Joining the app meant that he could also see what his students were watching, and also see how his classes were affecting their viewing habits. For example, after talking about film noir in a cinematography class, he began to notice 1944’s “Double Indemnity” start to pop up on his students’ pages, their horizon’s broadening in real time.
“I see my students having their own community in it,” he said. “It’s creating conversations and having people talk about these things. It’s just so easy. It makes it so easy.”
Niche social media sites – sites focused on common interests, like Goodreads, or Strava, or Letterboxd – are not as popular as apps like Instagram or TikTok. But they do provide a more tight knit community online – and one not quite as rife with controversy.
“To me, [Letterboxd] is really pure,” SCAD student Yusi Li said. “The community is really, from what I’ve seen, pretty wholesome.”
Wholesome for all ages, too – Matt said that his grandmother also counts herself among Letterboxd’s users.
“[It’s a] nice little mainstream kind of hub, where everybody can be like – I watched this film, I didn’t like it, or I did like it. There’s that whole discussion,” Matt said. “It didn’t feel like some weird movie forum online. It felt pretty safe for all demographics and generations.”
In a Bloomberg article from last year, journalist Teresa Xie wrote about the ways that these smaller online communities can provide a refuge of sorts from giant social media companies. Whether you want to avoid the targeted ads of apps like TikTok or Instagram, or the fraught negativity of a place like X (formerly known as Twitter), something like Letterboxd can provide that safe haven.
“[X], no matter what I browse and no matter how much I try to avoid, there’s always something political, negativity, and like, hate speech getting retweeted,” Yusi said.
Tanner said he still uses X and Instagram more than he does Letterboxd, but he also recently joined a separate niche community called League of Comic Geeks – Letterboxd, but for comic books.
“It’s good to kind of get a break from all of the stuff going on on [X],” Tanner said.
Unlike the high profile owners of certain social media sites – the Mark Zuckerbergs and Elon Musks of the world – the Letterboxd founders (Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow) have a relatively low profile. For Matt, that works in their favor. After Musk’s takeover of X in 2022, usership fell pretty drastically. If Letterboxd keeps increasing in popularity the way it is, and the founders continue to stay lowkey, that drop off doesn’t appear to be in the app’s near future.
“I don’t know anything about the Letterboxd founder,” Matt said. “I think that has been pretty beneficial.”