Letterboxd is for sale! Let's buy Letterboxd!!

Seriously folks, now is the time to put the tools in our own hands. It can be done, and will be done -- with your help.

Letterboxd is for sale! Oh no! Oh yes! It could mean the tragic end of a glorious beginning or the start of something even greater. And in many ways, which outcome it may be, is up to us… if we act quickly.

Never before have we had such a community of cinema lovers as we now have in Letterboxd. An aggregated community of the world’s true film lovers is an incredible grail. The Letterboxd founders have done a remarkable job making sure Letterboxd has always been about the community, but that now could be lost. What would happen if the TechBrosCos swept another gem into their walled garden, only so they can mine all the data for their own greedy and malicious ways? If we don’t act now, that possibility is a likely outcome.

Luckily, the community is ready to act

Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative is a mission-first, public benefit corporation organizing a community-led campaign to purchase 60% of Letterboxd from the private equity firm that currently holds it. Full-disclosure: I am one of their advisors.

The team is here with us on FilmStack, and has written about their work over the past year developing their cooperative marketing platform for filmmakers with Cactuslab, the team behind Letterboxd.

They worked simultaneously with a team from Harvard Law School to create a unique, mission-first corporate governance structure. This one-of-a-kind governance structure allows Intrinsic to:

• Prioritize social mission alongside (and even above) maximizing return to shareholders;

• Build a coalition of mission-first angel investors, filmmakers, film fans, and user-owners;

• Offer supportive angel investors an exit strategy in which they gradually sell their shares to artists and community owners. This ensures the platform evolves into an artist-owned cooperative rather than a private equity extraction scheme.

As much as they would like it to be otherwise, cinema is not a subset of tech – and we can make efforts to ensure it no longer will be. Companies don’t have to be slaves to profit or shareholders. Companies can value public benefit and all their stakeholders – and that is the possibility we now have before us with Letterboxd. We can stop it from landing in the enshitification slide before that virus takes hold.

There are 26 million Letterboxd users. If 3 million of them contribute $20, or 6 million of them contribute $10, we are in the game. Maybe some people give a little more; some people give a little less. The point is that we have the numbers to take on the bids we assume will come from private capital if we work together.

Luckily, the community has a public benefit corporation with just the right legal structure to pull this off.

But HOW would it work?

When the Semafor story broke, Intrinsic and our coalition immediately leapt into action. We had spent the entire year building an entity structure that allowed for democratic ownership of marketing platforms for filmmakers. We were ready to meet the moment.

You might be wondering who will run Letterboxd if we buy it together with a tidal wave of small donations…

Our proposal is that members of the collaborative (whether mission-driven equity investors or people who buy a low-cost membership to Intrinsic in which they are members but not equity owners), will get to vote for representatives to a Board of Governors.

The Board of Governors will be comprised of mission-first impact investors, filmmakers, fans, social impact technologists, and even people who care about democratic business models.

We propose that our Board of Governors work in partnership with the existing Letterboxd team to coooperatively shape the future of Letterboxd as a community asset.

What would owning Letterboxd mean to the community?

What would it mean for the people that are more than just aligned with cinema to own the community? That’s democracy, friend! Stakeholder democracy – and not shareholder capitalism. The actions we take can be evaluated by the question of whether it is good for cinema, good for the art, artist or audience — not just how much money can we make or the leaders take (like it always is now).

We also all know how this story usually goes (if we don’t act)

A beloved platform reaches scale. The execs arrive. The dashboards replace the seasoned, experienced, cinema-loving humans. The algorithm ultimately decides what matters. Community becomes about “engagement.” The art becomes “content.” And slowly… almost imperceptibly at first… the thing we loved with all our heart wastes away into that vapor thin almost nothingness.

By being forced to sell a majority stake, Letterboxd is dangerously close to that tipping point.

Sure, Letterboxd’s size is magnificent, but that is not the real power. Here, power is distinction and that distinction is flavor, is taste. The Tech Platforms see cinema now as “content tiles.” But not Letterboxd. It is one of the last places on the internet where a four-hour Hungarian slow cinema film and a straight-to-video shark movie can coexist, be debated, memed, canonized, and rediscovered. That ecology is fragile. Oh so effin’ fragile.

Private equity does not preserve ecosystems. It “optimizes” them for shareholder profit until they collapse.

And let’s be honest: the incentives are clear. The venture-backed and public companies likely circling Letterboxd probably won’t let Letterboxd stay Letterboxd for long.

When Tiny acquired Letterboxd in 2023, they made it a point to say “We’ve been huge fans and users of Letterboxd for a long time and could not be more excited to join forces with Matthew, Karl, and the rest of the team for the long-term.” For whatever reasons they decided to sell now, it is unlikely most of the potential buyers are looking at it as a philanthropic project.

It would become:

• A funnel into streaming subscriptions

• A data delivery machine for studios and advertisers

• A ranking engine optimized for “time spent” instead of taste cultivated

• A place where the weird, the niche, the challenging gets buried under what converts

We’ve seen this movie before. We know the ending.

But this time, we are not powerless.

We can buy it! Seriously. This is the moment that crowd funding, crowd equity, mission-driven leadership, and public benefit companies were created for. Time to play!

What if Letterboxd became a Public Benefit Company owned—meaningfully, structurally—by its community?

Let’s not do this as they would; not as a gimmick and not as a marketing line, but something baked into the company’s governance:

• A charter that legally prioritizes cinema culture, not just profit

• A board that includes filmmakers, critics, archivists, and everyday users

• Transparent decision-making about algorithms, features, and partnerships

• Guardrails against extractive monetization

This is the better world we dream about, but is not utopian. It is simply a different set of incentives.

Intrinsic has built just the business model for these ideals to take hold in an already-incorporated, ready to rock public benefit corporation. And I’m proud to be part of it.

A community-owned Letterboxd doesn’t just avoid enshitification—it can actively build something better:

• A true set of canons, not a trending page. Lists and rankings shaped by curators, critics, and communities—not just engagement metrics. And across multiple perspectives, where different subsets can hold different views.

• Support for filmmakers. Direct pathways for discovery, funding, and distribution that don’t rely on studio gatekeeping.

• Global cinema visibility. Elevating films beyond the Anglo-American patriarchal algorithmic bias that dominates most platforms.

• Archival responsibility. Partnering with institutions to preserve and surface film history, not just monetize the present.

• Healthy discourse. Designing for conversation and criticism, not outrage and virality. Let’s bring context back to the cinema experience.

Letterboxd could become not just a platform, but an institution.

There’s also something deeper at stake here.

Cinema has always been communal. It is an art form that lives in shared experience—whether in a theater or in conversation after. Letterboxd is one of the few digital spaces that still feels like that: a global, asynchronous film club where anticipatory joy blooms, and post-viewing ecstasy flowers.

To hand that over to purely extractive ownership is to misunderstand what it is.

Owning it ourselves is a cultural mission, and not a financial flex.

The numbers matter.

26 million users is not just a vanity metric—it’s a base of potential stewards. If even a fraction steps up, this becomes one of the most interesting experiments in digital ownership we’ve ever seen.

But beyond the initial raise, the model can evolve:

• Tiered membership that supports the platform without locking out users

• Grants and partnerships with film institutions

• Ethical monetization that aligns with user value, not exploitation

• A long-term endowment model that protects independence

If we do this, we are not just buying a company; we are designing our future.

Of course, this will be messy. Governance will be hard. Consensus will be imperfect and may be a total pain in the ass. Not every decision will please everyone. But compare that to the alternative: decisions made in boardrooms where cinema is a line item.

Messy democracy vs. optimized extraction.

That’s the choice – a choice we’ve always had. In the big picture it is the battle we now face everywhere. Let’s get some points on the board while we can. There is a window here. It won’t stay open long. If we believe that cinema matters—not just as entertainment, but as art, history, joy and a shared language—then this is the kind of moment we show up for.

Because if we don’t decide what Letterboxd becomes next, someone else will. And they won’t be asking what’s good for cinema.

What happens if we don’t act?

Well, we can look at the start of current Paramount/Warners merger for how this usually goes: At first, nothing changes. Reassurances are made. “We love the community.” “We’re not going to mess with what works.” Maybe even a few shiny new features roll out to keep everyone calm.Then the slow drift to enshitification begins.

Let’s put it in Letterboxd terms: the homepage stops being about you and starts being about them. Films aren’t surfaced because they’re interesting—they’re surfaced because they’re promotable. Because someone paid. Because someone partnered. Because someone needs to hit a quarterly target. Your feed gets… louder. More “engaging.” Less thoughtful. The edges sanded down and rounded off.

Then comes the algorithmic turn: lists you made for love become inputs for a recommendation engine optimized for retention. Reviews become training data. Taste becomes something to soften, flatten, predict, and monetize. The weird corners of cinema—the stuff Letterboxd has always been so good at nurturing—start to disappear from view. Not banned. Not removed. Just… not surfaced. Disappeared.

And then, inevitably, monetization tightens. Ads creep in, then dominate. “Premium visibility” becomes a thing. Studios and streamers get preferential placement. Data gets packaged and sold upstream.The community becomes a resource to extract from, not something to serve.

Your attention becomes the product. Your taste becomes the asset. Your participation becomes unpaid labor in someone else’s machine.

And culturally, something even more subtle—and more devastating—happens. Letterboxd stops shaping taste and starts reflecting the lowest common denominator of it. Instead of discovering a 1990s Taiwanese masterpiece because someone you follow is obsessed with it, you’re nudged toward whatever is already winning everywhere else. The monoculture tightens. The same films dominate every surface. The same conversations repeat.

Cinema becomes smaller.

There’s also the risk of enclosure. APIs close. Data becomes less portable. Integrations shrink unless they serve revenue. The open, slightly scrappy ecosystem around Letterboxd gets tidied up into something more “controlled.” Because control is valuable. And community, in those models, is something to manage—not something to empower.

Worst case? Letterboxd becomes just another node in a larger media funnel. A place designed to push you toward: specific streaming platforms, specific releases, specific “moments” engineered elsewhere. Not a place to experience cinema—but a place to be directed through it.

And the tragedy is: none of this would happen because anyone is evil. It would happen because the incentives are evil. They are the wrong ones. Stakeholder capitalism destroys culture. Once the mandate is growth, extraction, and return, everything else—community, taste, care—becomes secondary. Then optional. And then gone.

The Intrinsic team and their coalition has already put in the work. Their model scales up. I’m excited to be part of the solution. It’s time for action.