Letterboxd is an increasingly popular social media platform that serves as a film diary. The app has exploded in popularity in the last couple of years amongst all types of film lovers, including A-listers like Olivia Rodrigo, Rachel Zegler, and Martin Scorsese.
The primary function of the Letterboxd app is to track every film you watch. The platform lets you rate films on a 5-star scale, publish your own reviews, and interact with people who love the same films you do. You can also add your friends to see what they’re watching, how they rated films, and what they recommend (or don’t). You can also make lists, monitor your personal watching statistics, read published articles, and see cast and crew profiles, almost like IMDB.
Now that you know what Letterboxd is, assuming you didn’t before, let’s get into why I believe the app is making cinephiles, or movie lovers, cool. That is because the app has grown in popularity so much that celebrities, such as Ayo Edebiri and Paul Thomas Anderson have not only heard of it, but have accounts and film diaries on the app themselves. The Letterboxd app has grown so much that they have a press pass and are often found on red carpets, asking celebrities about their favorite films or reading them popular reviews from their app, which tend to go viral. Interviewees include Nic Cage, Tom Hanks, Keanu Reeves and Natalie Portman, to name a few.
These viral celebrity interviews produced by the Letterboxd marketing team, which are then put on apps like TikTok or YouTube, have drawn in a younger crowd which has made their app a sensation! In 2023, Letterboxd had about 341 million reviews logged on their app. The company has gone from about 1 million users in 2020, to over 10 million today. It’s becoming a big deal, just ask your buddy that goes to the movie theater way too often!
Letterboxd has become so popular that we are starting to see characters in films and TV shows talk about the app just as casually as Facebook and Instagram. In fact, Letterboxd was recently mentioned in 2023’s Scream VI. Being mentioned in major blockbuster franchises such as Scream proves how successful the once small app is now.
Personally, I think that Letterboxd is a fantastic and user-friendly app that anyone can use and enjoy! In fact, I know some friends whose parents are on the app. I am a huge movie fan and it’s really cool to have one place where I can go back and see when I watched a film, who I watched it with, and refresh my memory on what I thought about it. Being in college and away from my family and friends means that we often don’t have time to talk about the movies we’ve seen recently, so it’s awesome to open Letterboxd and see what films they have been watching. It’s an especially fun way to stay linked to those you may not see often.
Letterboxd is a unique and easy way for movie lovers to connect with each other and be part of the conversation around a film. With the growing popularity of the app, the celebrities that endorse it, and the viral interview moments they produce, it’s safe to say that Letterboxd is changing the way people watch films and making cinephiles cool.