What the singular success of this social network can tell us about the future of a community-first marketing approach.
If you’ve spent any time in a movie theater lately, you may have noticed something different. When the credits roll and the lights come up, your fellow patrons aren’t rushing for the exit or picking at their last crumbs of popcorn. No, it’s likely that a good chunk of the audience has their phone open, furiously typing into a tiny screen.
The social film discovery app Letterboxd has embedded itself as an essential pillar of film-going culture for the TikTok era. Experts and enthusiasts alike flock to the website to compare notes and debate what makes a movie worthy of four-and-a-half or five stars. Through organic, word-of-mouth hype and viral social media content, the platform has become a genuine phenomenon.
Identifying the rabid but untapped potential audience of young film fans around the world, founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow positioned their website as an alternative to the data-driven Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the critic-focused Rotten Tomatoes. The app was born out of New Zealand in 2011, slowly gaining users around the movie-going world and exploding in popularity during the peak of the pandemic as binge-watchers and completionists traded obscure recommendations and compiled lists of essential, underseen gems while locked up at home.
Letterboxd has proven that a community-first brand marketing strategy can drive real results by capturing a tapped-in audience and delivering high-quality content.
Four Ways Letterbox Builds Brand Love
Democratizing Film Discussion
While the COVID-19 lockdowns initially fueled the platform’s rapid spike in popularity, it has continued to gain momentum. As social trends like ‘Gentleminions’ and the Barbenheimmer phenomenon brought audiences back to inject life into desperate theater chains, Letterboxd has emerged as an unmistakable staple of the culture through high-profile celebrity endorsements and a sharp, true-to-life voice on social media.
Awareness of Letterboxd grew organically, through loyal ambassadors advocating for a platform they knew their friends would love, too. Visitors often describe the platform as feeling like ‘vintage internet’ and eagerly encourage their friends to join. The app grew from 4 million active accounts at the end of 2021 to over 14 million in less than three years — a remarkable achievement for what began as a niche IMDb competitor.
The brand provides film fans of all ages and levels of taste a centralized place to discuss their thoughts on established classics and new favorites. Letterboxd’s editorial team doesn’t skew too high-brow or play the role of a gatekeeper — publishing stats like average review scores and lets users filter what their friends have seen or recently added to their watchlist. On the homepage, you can find a list of the most highly-rated films by the entire community, and even apply a filter to see how many you have already watched.
This approach gives users an aspirational view of the platform, not one that’s meant to intimidate. Users from various backgrounds around the world track their activity, log progress, and start global conversations.
The rise in awareness for the app can certainly be attributed to the positive brand association and a borderline cult of personality that obsessive users drive within the online community. But another key factor in accounting for how Letterboxd has carved out a distinctly unique space on social media is emphasizing its core mechanics — watching, logging, and reviewing movies.
Curating Excellent User-Generated Content
On a functional level, every individual page can serve as a potential rabbit hole in waiting. Upon checking the app, you may see that a friend has logged an obscure Italian film from the 1970s and spend the next hour spiraling down the legacy of its writers. The entire website’s organization is designed to open up opportunities like this, positioning the service as both a historical archive and a networking channel.
After watching a new movie, many power users rush to open the app before the credits have even finished rolling. These posts can range in length from in-depth academic essays to one-sentence jokes, weighted exactly the same based on who you follow and how many likes each post has received. But they may not be thinking about what the filmmakers would have to say about their hastily written review.
As the platform has grown, its members have realized that even some of the biggest names in the film industry might be reading their reviews. One of Letterboxd’s most high-profile moments came when legendary director Martin Scorsese, a TikTok sensation in his own right, announced he had joined the platform. His account quickly became the most-followed on the platform, and this promotion was paired with a curated list of films that inspired his latest movie, Killers of the Flower Moon.
The brand has been highly effective in incorporating its own users into the conversation, elevating them from casual contributors to key members of the broader film culture.
Letterboxd’s marketing team is particularly skilled at finding memorable, insightful pull-quotes from within the platform and using them in promotional materials. These authentic community comments even make their way onto official movie posters and trailers, feeding into the cycle of anticipation and hype that the platform thrives on.
Creating Value Through Exclusive Content
Letterboxd is far from the first brand to find success by creating a social-first video series that lets viewers relate to celebrities and influential users through relatable, down-to-earth questions. A key distinction, however, is the degree to which users at home can play along with the constantly viral ‘Four Favorites’ franchise.
Four Favorites
Taking inspiration from GQ’s “Things I Can’t Live Without” or Vogue’s “73 Questions” series, a social media manager turns a microphone on recognizable stars and crewmembers to list their top four films at the moment. This content ties directly into a key platform feature, the first thing visitors to a new profile will see — four movies hand-selected by any user to share their personal taste.
These videos serve multiple purposes: they educate viewers on film history, act as a fast-paced recommendation engine, and give fans a chance to connect with their favorite stars over shared interests. It may seem like a simple premise, but it resonates deeply with film lovers. Audiences can watch a director or actor share their picks and compare them with their own favorites. In just a few moments, you learn more about the stars’ personalities and can keep the conversation going in-app.
Reading Your Reviews
Another successful video series brings these user reviews to life by having directors and actors read real feedback shared on Letterboxd. This clever concept celebrates engaged community members, showing that their voices matter — even if they’re posting a simple review on the major new release of the week. It’s a playful, lighthearted way to showcase user interaction, while still reminding followers that there’s a chance, however slim, someone like Emma Stone could be reading their five-star take on Poor Things.
Users see themselves reflected in the content, feel included in the cultural conversation, and become more motivated to engage.
Filmography Breakdown
Letterboxd works with highly-talented video editors and content creators to prepare video packages themed around major moments in the film industry. These can include montages that highlight a given director’s career to celebrate their next project or tours through some of the biggest video rental stores still in existence.
Even as part of the traditional press tours to promote new releases, high-profile actors and directors want to swing by Letterboxd HQ to record a video reflecting on some of their most iconic projects and sharing behind-the-scenes secrets.
This video content speaks to the obsessive, insatiable appetite of the most-dedicated members of the Letterboxd community and provides a real value they won’t get anywhere else.
Integrating Highly Requested Features
Celebrity endorsements are far from the only tactic Letterboxd employs to foster such a dedicated community. Member feedback is taken seriously, and the brand’s owned channels position new updates as major moments worth celebrating. Many of these updates are initially exclusive to paid members, incentivizing users to subscribe.
Some notable updates based on user feedback include:
- Profile Banners with a Pro subscription, adding a backdrop from the user’s favorite movie to the top of their public page
- Additional personalization through customizable Cast and Crew photos and the ability to select custom posters for any given film on the website. When the ability to change the individual image used on these backdrops was announced, Letterboxd partnered with Focus Features to promote The Bikeriders by allowing any user, even a non-subscriber, to choose their favorite display image.
- Ability to select the streaming services a user currently has access to and display information on what films from their watchlist were available on those platforms.
- Experimenting with displaying showtimes in your area for newly released films. This is also a sign of the company’s growing relationship with theatrical distributors that have a presence on the network, including Mubi and A24.
Letterboxd Has Become an Essential Part of the Film Enthusiast Lifestyle
To the uninitiated, this is just a hat adorned with three colorful dots. But to those in the know, the highly-sought after, limited-edition piece of official Letterboxd merch signifies a sophisticated fan of cinema, a fellow traveler on the data-obsessed social platform of the moment.
In an age of information overload, building a brand that people care about enough to wear as a badge — without compensation — is no small feat. The runaway success of Letterboxd highlights the power of cultivating an authentic, engaged audience, and its rise serves as a testament to the effectiveness of community-focused brand marketing.
