Letterboxd Is up for Sale. Say Goodbye to Fun.

13 days ago by CobraChicken3000 to c/movies

A24, Sony, and ‘The New York Times’ are lining up to bid on everyone’s favorite film review platform. No matter what, the end is nigh.

A24, Sony, and The New York Times are lining up to bid on everyone's favorite film-review platform. No matter what, the end is nigh.

Stop ruining our things!

Jhex 51 points 13 days ago

themoviedb.comorg it is!

Indeed, it is an org domain, sorry about that, thanks @TingoTenga for the correction

https://www.themoviedb.org/

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TingoTenga 5 points 13 days ago

.org?

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bradbeattie 4 points 13 days ago

To my knowledge, tmdb doesn't do user lists.

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degen 12 points 13 days ago

Why does a movie database need to be turned into social media? Even user reviews are usually asinine babbling and random users' lists really junked up imdb imo.

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Jhex 3 points 13 days ago

I have not tested it myself (only really know about them because of Emby scrapers) but it looks like they do

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bradbeattie 2 points 13 days ago

Ah, fair point. But these aren't searchable. You can create them and explicitly share them, but Letterboxd let's you search by list title or list content, a key missing feature here. :/

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Jhex 3 points 13 days ago

well, it's an open project… perhaps we can petition this feature or contribute to get it developed

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kip 1 point 13 days ago

shame it's missing the diary/log feature, i like letterboxd mainly for that. you can import your exported ratings from letterboxd and sort by date but it's nowhere near as detailed. but then it's also missing the abysmally unfunny one line reviews so overall maybe an improvement

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rumimevlevi 32 points 13 days ago

Studios making movies buying review website is wild

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orionsbelt 12 points 13 days ago

surprisingly it’s not uncommon :(

amazon owns imdb fandango owns rotten tomatoes (not a studio but not a far step away)

i forget the others but yeah, sucks

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rumimevlevi 3 points 13 days ago

For Amazon at least try purchased imdb before starting producing shows and movies

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Majestic 1 point 13 days ago

Amazon is a tech company not a studio. The thing is Amazon doesn’t care a bit about their production side because it is an ant. They make money hand over fist selling the internet infrastructure to deliver video content for all the major streaming companies.

The data alone from user preferences on IMDB is probably worth more than the revenue they derive from their studio efforts.

Hate how there’s no API access and they’ve put up that web firewall since AI scrapers though.

edit: I see some people are upset at my statement but it's a fact. Unlike say Paramount or Disney, production of media doesn't make up any significant amount of Amazon's global revenues nor is it a primary business concern in the way dominating online shopping or content delivery for the web is. As such Amazon is a tech company that owns a studio but that studio is not at the wheel so to speak for decisions and is probably a side venture more than a genuine attempt to dethrone or replace the existing movie studios (if Amazon wanted to do that they'd buy an existing one). It's a way to make some unique content to keep people subscribing to prime and watching prime video as a kind of draw for keeping them paying for and using prime generally which feeds into maintaining dominance of online shopping. It also funnels customers into paying for streaming subs from other companies like HBO through Prime which gives Amazon a cut.

Given that, Amazon's interests are torn between its own studio which is mainly a value add for prime subscriptions and a prestige "we can make TV too" thing for Bezos and the fact the other studios and cable companies are big, big customers of theirs for AWS. But the weight on the scale is clearly against the studio in that equation.

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tehBishop 2 points 12 days ago

To be fair, Amazon does own MGM.

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Foni 26 points 13 days ago

I mean, there's a Fediverse alternative to Goodreads (Bookwyrm). Could someone make a federated version of Letterboxd?

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Microw 8 points 12 days ago path: 0 26180337 26187748, hotness: undefined, score: 8, children: 3
Foni 3 points 12 days ago

It looks very good, I didn't know about it, for now it seems that the majority of the community speaks Chinese, which complicates things a little for me, but the database itself I don't know where it comes from because it comes out in Spanish (my language) so it looks fantastic, I'm going to join a server and see if they manage to continue growing and increase the western servers

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yessikg 1 point 6 days ago

All I was waiting for was for reviews to federate better across servers

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Arda 1 point 4 days ago

i was on neodb.kevga.de but it went down a bit ago and it seems dead :( What are some other instances ?

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CobraChicken3000 4 points 13 days ago

what's bookwyrm? genuinely curious.

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Foni 8 points 13 days ago

The FeDiverse version of Goodreads, a social networking app for books and reading, lets you keep track of the books you've read and share reviews of them, as well as follow others and their reviews.

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moopet 3 points 12 days ago

Oh I forgot Bookwyrm existed. Time to go back.

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BauerBender -9 points 13 days ago

I could shout at the walls in my house all by myself for the same experience as a Federated Lexterboxd.

I know you Fedi people are loners, but there comes a point where building a social media website for yourself becomes a bit tedious. Hell, if you want to be alone just go on Friendica.

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Doomsider 7 points 13 days ago

Friendica: A place to be alone.

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Foni 2 points 12 days ago

Someone could have said the same thing 3 or 4 years ago about this place, and today here we have you, commenting on how lonely other places are.

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BauerBender -2 points 12 days ago

Ok? I’m not wrong though

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WhyJiffie 2 points 12 days ago

then you can keep using the soon enshittified letterboxd, I guess, if that's your cup of tea, and shun everyone trying to do something to improve the situation. I'm sure reddit too has more people users than lemmy, btw.

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BauerBender -1 points 12 days ago

Pipe down

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sentient_loom 22 points 13 days ago

I'm surprised Amazon doesn't already own it.

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TribblesBestFriend 9 points 13 days ago

I was sure Amazon owns it

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sentient_loom 9 points 13 days ago

They own IMDB and Goodreads, but I never heard anything about them owning Letterboxd.

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one_old_coder 13 points 13 days ago

I don't know if it's better but I moved to https://app.trakt.tv/ a few weeks ago. It also has TV shows which is nice.

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Eyck_of_denesle 12 points 13 days ago

It has worse restrictions than Letterboxd. It puts a lot of limits like you can only save 100 movies and shows combined in Watch Later or lists. It's scrobbler sync and tracking upcoming episodes are great tho. Good if you can pay subscription.

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one_old_coder 2 points 13 days ago

Where did you get the 100 movies limit? I already have more than 500 movies to watch and they never tried to sell me any subscription.

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Eyck_of_denesle 4 points 13 days ago

This is from 2025. That's when I dropped it.

I see it changed to 250 now but i don't see anything saying 500. This is the 2026 one.

Also do read the threads I linked. People are not happy. It seems to have gotten worse.

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Sunspear 7 points 13 days ago

Trakt was really nice years ago, but ever since they redesigned the UI (and locked it behind an initial login), it's an ugly, UX-unfriendly mess that becomes harder and harder to use.

I really like its concept though, so I'm getting closer to self-hosting it (=something equivalent), and then at least everything that isn't the social aspect will work out neatly

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iagomago 12 points 13 days ago

Honest to god, while I do love Letterboxd, it is a terrible site at doing what it does. Especially its search features. It's comically paradoxical than even something like RateYourMusic, which is 1) old as fuck and 2) not even made for movies, is able to build an arguably larger, more detailed and better chart-adjusted database for flicks than what a dedicated site/app does.

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lazynooblet 10 points 13 days ago

I had never heard of this platform until now 😕

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Jarix 9 points 13 days ago

There's 2 of us!

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blackshirt 1 point 12 days ago

3

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VerilyFemme 8 points 13 days ago

Wow, I never thought I'd see modern MSM acknowledge Andy Griffith's A Face in the Crowd.

Fucking chilling movie.

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adarza 4 points 13 days ago

we all knew this day was coming once private equity bought a majority stake in the site a few years back. am a little surprised it took this long, actually.

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reboot6675 4 points 13 days ago

Damn. I really liked the straightforward UI and simple features... Now they will surely enshittify it, hide stuff behind login walls (or worse paywalls), put features that no one asked for, add verified accounts and whatnot, tons of ads, and make the UI look like crap.

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bowsertattoo 3 points 13 days ago

i just use a spreadsheet for this

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RedSnt 3 points 13 days ago

I say goodbye to the 5/5 score. Don't make me do math

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bmpvy 2 points 13 days ago

goshdarnit I'm gonna get my pocketmoney and buy it myself

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Arda 1 point 4 days ago

use neodb

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