There are no silver bullets for solving the crisis in independent film distribution, but there are a lot of industry professionals looking to Letterboxd—and its opinionated and rapidly growing 15 million–strong community of cinephiles—as an important new tool for their survival. Most crucially, as one distributor put it, “They’ve opened up a new channel of communication between filmmakers and their audiences, both actual and potential.” And, unlike other major industry disrupters, from Netflix to Rotten Tomatoes before it, Letterboxd appears to be embracing independent films as a distinct part of its identity.

Matthew Buchanan, Letterboxd’s New Zealand–based co-founder, told Filmmaker, “Our key mission is to help our community discover films that they might love, and absolutely integral to this are independent films, which don’t always get the awareness they deserve.”

Indeed, Letterboxd’s weekly updated Top 50 of 2024 recently included in its top 10 the no-budget comic adventure Hundreds of Beavers, film festival documentary hits Daughters and No Other Land, a Japanese anime blockbuster and a Thai tearjerker (the latter driven, no doubt, by Letterboxd’s large international base—only 35 percent of users are U.S. based).

Additionally, the site’s editorial team continuously touts independents: its ongoing “Watchlist This!” posts focus on “best new bubbling-under films” and recently recommended such non-studio films as Monica Sorelle’s Mountains and JT Mollner’s Strange Darling, while the company’s Instagram account, which has 1.4 million followers, has included Elliot Page talking about his film Close to You, sandwiched in between posts referencing Éric Rohmer’s 1986 film The Green Ray and a Studio Ghibli re-release.

“Letterboxd is a real safe harbor for cinephiles,” said Kyle Greenberg, head of marketing and distribution at Utopia, one of many specialty distributors that uses the site to market its titles. (Letterboxd has not yet worked directly with filmmakers.) In a media ecosystem dominated by corporate-owned trades, pay-to-play press coverage and a lack of interest in traditional film reviews, especially from younger audiences who feel they “don’t represent them,” Greenberg argued that “it’s incredibly refreshing and important to have a platform such as Letterboxd that democratizes the conversation around film.”

Film marketers use the site in straightforward ways—by paying for website banner ads and email campaigns—but with the ability to focus specifically on users who have liked comparable films or genres or who are based in precise locations. “We can follow these people around Letterboxd with the ads,” explained Letterboxd’s head of business David Larkin. “So, we’re able to create targeting segments based on film taste and can market to them accordingly.” (Users, however, have to opt-in to receive e-blasts or targeted emails, and paying “Pro”-tier subscribers avoid third-party ads and associated tracking ads.)

But distributors also see Letterboxd as distinct from marketing on other major social media platforms. “As a paid media option, it couldn’t be more different from Meta,” explained Magnolia Pictures’s head of distribution and marketing Neal Block. “You’re reaching a very specific audience segment that Meta often struggles to find, and reaching them cost-effectively,” he added, referring specifically to “a young, diverse, cinema-literate, and—most important—enthusiastic audience.”

As an example, Block points specifically to Magnolia’s recent release Thelma. “A flurry of great reviews showed up on Letterboxd following some national sneaks a couple weeks before the opening, so we knew their user base was into it,” he explained, which then informed its marketing spend on display ads on the site and email messaging. “There was a lot of Thelma talk on the platform, and we were able to amplify it and keep it going,” he added. “We didn’t have to start from scratch.”

Ryan Krivoshey, CEO and founder of another small distributor, Grasshopper Film, said Letterboxd was a “perfect fit” for its release of Brazilian director Kleber Mendonça Filho’s meditation on movies and moviegoing, Pictures of Ghosts, because it was “so deeply and passionately about the movies,” he said. “It also greatly helped that Kleber has a strong presence and following on the platform, so there was a natural way for people to discover the new film.” During the film’s opening weekend, many audience members cited learning about the film and its release from Letterboxd, according to Krivoshey.

Elizabeth Arnott, Music Box Films’s marketing and publicity manager, agreed the site can be very effective at amplifying festival hits, genre films and movies about movies, such as driving audiences to its recent Ennio Morricone documentary based on fans of his films. Utopia’s Greenberg pointed to its release of Sean Price Williams’s 2023 Cannes Directors Fortnight
entry The Sweet East as “very well suited for the cinephile audience on Letterboxd.” With more than $300,000 in North American box office revenues at press time, Greenberg said the film is among the company’s highest performing theatrical and VOD titles this year, “so we do see a correlation between Letterboxd attention and general performance,” he said.

According to Letterboxd’s own 2023 internal survey, 87 percent of its paid members go to the movie theaters at least once a month, with 39 percent of that same group visiting cinemas three or more times per month. Letterboxd’s Larkin specifically pointed to its ability to push during a film’s crucial opening days of release. He referenced its help with the successful launch of Sideshow’s foreign film Oscar contender Drive My Car in late 2021. “We could find the 20,000 people on Letterboxd who want to see that movie in New York or L.A.” he said, “and start to get the buzz going in the larger social circles of Letterboxd members.”

But not everyone sees online talk translating to IRL behavior, such as buying tickets or transactional purchases. “It’s hard to say how much of an impact they’ve had, especially on the paid marketing side,” one executive told us. “I think it’s still a niche platform.” Yet even this skeptical insider shared a widespread confidence in Letterboxd’s robust ability to spark organic buzz and unpaid viral marketing—whether by touting particular films and posting audience testimonies on its social media platforms, through its highly popular “Four Favorites” series on YouTube or just simply being an epicenter for opining on movies. For now, at least, this kind of authentic and non-corporate-related fan culture has a special marketing sway that money can’t buy. As Greenberg said, “The commentary is more authentic, and it feels [like] audiences/users are well aware of that authenticity.”

In the data-driven digital media ecosystem, Letterboxd also appears well-suited to take advantage of its users’ behavior to more effectively target them. But Larkin said they’re still developing ways to harness it. “There’s a tremendous amount of data there,” he admitted. “We think that’s something we can scale up, and we’re working on it, but we haven’t really focused yet on making it into a standalone product.” For now, according to Music Box’s Arnott, users’ engagements on newsletters—such as opens and click-throughs—are “great data to have,” and some acquisition and distribution executives admitted to checking the site for real-time scores after festival premieres or increases in “Watchlist” numbers after trailer drops.

But if anyone is expecting Letterboxd to become its own arthouse viewing platform—for example, another Criterion or MUBI—it’s likely they’re going to have to wait. Film distribution itself, said Larkin, “is a very different business than we’re in now. The advantage is that we have an audience, and we don’t have to recreate it every single time. But right now, our business is giving access to that audience. Could we leverage that in other ways? Could be.” Buchanan doesn’t seem to rule it out. “We’re always considering new ways to connect our audiences with the films they want to see,” he said. “We wouldn’t rule out other methods of distribution in the future.”