Letterboxd has long been the discursive mecca where film nerds go to share their online opinions about the movies they’ve watched. Now, however, the platform appears to be trying to transform itself into a place where said nerds can also watch movies, not just talk about them.
On Wednesday, the company announced that it will soon be launching what it calls its “Video Store”—a “film rental platform inside Letterboxd.” As far as can be discerned, this new feature is going to allow users to rent (and watch) movies right out of the Letterboxd interface. The announcement says that it will be compatible with iOS, Android, Apple TV, Android TV, Chromecast, and AirPlay, and notes that other smart TV app integrations are “in the works.”
Just like the video stores of old, this new online “store” will allow users to pick from a variety of “curated shelves,” which are designed to guide the user towards particular cinematic experiences rather than leaving them adrift in an endless sea of interchangeable content. Categories like “festival standouts,” “long-watchlisted titles,” “restorations and rediscoveries,” and “limited-time drops” will all be part of the mix.
Some of the curation will be done via an algorithm based on user data. The company said in a press release: “We program these shelves using millions of watchlists, reviews and other secret sauce signals. It’s like walking into your local video store and seeing the ’employee picks’ shelf—and those employees are countless Letterboxd members across the globe.”
The site additionally notes that the availability and cost of particular rentals will depend on the user’s location.
Letterboxd’s new “Video Store” sounds a bit like the Criterion Channel, where users can pick from regularly updated film collections that are only available for a limited time (the announcement notes that some “shelves will be available for a limited time only”). If that’s the case, it’ll likely be a good model for the internet’s cinephiles, who may hanker for some direction when it comes to what to watch.
While it all sounds very exciting, there’s still a lot about the “Video Store” that we don’t know. Gizmodo reached out to Letterboxd for more details about the upcoming feature, which is scheduled to go live early next month.
It’s certainly a pleasant turn of events for the popular film site—and perhaps not what most users had been after its acquisition by Tiny, a large Canadian holding company, which purchased the site for $50 million in 2023.
Usually, when a big company buys a scrappy little site, bad things happen. However, since Tiny took over at Letterboxd, the site has only continued to thrive and change in largely positive ways. A new rental integration seems like just the ticket to keep users coming back for more.
Lucas Ropek
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