Why Letterboxd Became the Go-To Platform for Online Film Buffs

Over the past decade and change, Letterboxd has become a favorite social media destination for cinephiles who both deeply love film and are deeply, chronically online. The user-driven film review platform’s appeal may sound niche, and yet it now has over 17 million users, according to its 2024 year-end report.

The prevailing narrative is that Letterboxd took off during the pandemic, when everyone suddenly had a lot more time to watch movies. While the site indeed went from 1.7 million users in January 2020 to more than 3 million a year later, by that logic Letterboxd’s popularity and user activity would have slowed as the world opened back up.

The data from Letterboxd’s annual reports, however, shows that has not been the case. If anything, the site’s appeal and staying power has only become stronger in the years since the pandemic.

While Letterboxd hasn’t regularly reported its user growth, it has included key metrics, such as the number of reviews posted and number of films, in yearly reports since its 2012 launch. Charting these metrics together reveals that not only has site usership grown exponentially but so has user engagement almost across the board.

In particular, the number of reviews posted per year skyrocketed from under 300,000 in 2012 to almost 100 million in 2024, making for an over 3,300% increase. More impressive is the number of films marked “watched”: In 2022, Letterboxd announced on X that users logged 1 billion films since launch, over 700 million of those entered in 2024 alone.

While there is a noticeable bump in almost every 2020 metric, 2017 also seems to have been a consequential year. The number of ratings, for instance, nearly doubled, from 15.96 million in 2016 to over 30 million the following year; 2017 also happens to be the year IMDb shut down its message boards, forcing film buffs to take their theories and debates elsewhere.

That fact may speak to one reason behind Letterboxd’s staying power: It’s a throwback to an internet that increasingly doesn’t exist. The site feels reminiscent of early web blogs and forums but updated just enough for the social media age. Even as social platforms prioritize video content, the Letterboxd experience is defined by writing — earnest essays and one-liners alike.

Additionally, as AI and algorithms increasingly decide what art reaches consumers, Letterboxd cultivates a sense of discovery created by and for users.

It’s a place where “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and 1980s Soviet anti-war film “Come and See” have both been the highest-rated narrative film on the site at some point.

Above all else, Letterboxd is fun to use — more social driven than the data-focused IMDb, less chaotic than Rotten Tomatoes and far more welcoming than Film Twitter.

Whether Letterboxd can maintain that singularity as it continues to grow remains to be seen, but it sounds like it’s willing to try, as it aims to court another passionate and opinionated online community: the TV nerds.