Letterboxd Exploring Sale to Potential Buyers: Report
There have been rumors for months that Letterboxd, the great social media app and website for movie lovers, was being shopped to potential buyers. A new report claims that several major media companies are now in the running.
That’s according to a report in Puck that states that Letterboxd’s new corporate overlords could include Sony, Paramount Skydance, Reddit co-creator Alexis Ohanian, and even Netflix, the streaming giant. Variety said they reached out to Ohanian about the report and got this response: “Man I can’t sneeze without someone taking about it lol.”
Founded in New Zealand by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow in 2011, Letterboxd has become the go-to app for cinephiles. It allows users to rate, log, rank, list, and review everything they watch, and to see what their friends (and every user who wishes to keep their activity public) have been watching as well. A Canadian company called Tiny purchased a 60 percent stake in Letterboxd in 2023.
The site grew in popularity during Covid, when people had nothing else to do but watch movies and use the internet. By 2026, it had grown to over 30 million members worldwide.
READ MORE: The 10 Worst Movies of the Last 10 Years, According to Letterboxd
Those 30 million members will be watching this transaction very closely. Will the ultimate buyer of Letterboxd allow it to remain largely unchanged? Or will they attempt to add more monetization? (Letterboxd subscribers can use the app for free, or pay a relatively low annual price for extra features like the ability to change certain posters and images.)
Letterboxd recently introduced a “video store” to the app, allowing for online movie rentals of titles that hadn’t found distribution elsewhere. Will someone try to turn it into more of a full-fledged streaming service? Or, if it’s bought by a streaming service, to integrate its ratings and community into their own customer base?
Inevitably, every cool thing the Internet creates gets bought by someone eventually. Occasionally those cool things remain largely free of interference and relatively valuable; Amazon has owned IMDb for decades, and the site is still useful. But sometimes new owners make very unappealing changes. After Sony bought the Alamo Drafthouse, for instance, they instituted a strange new policy requiring customers to order food and drinks through their phones — when the very basis of the theater was the idea that you weren’t allowed to use your phone there at all. I am skeptical Alamo’s original ownership would have ever even considered such a plan.
Basically, time will tell. But as someone who spends waaaaaay too much time on Letterboxd, I am a little nervous.
