Letterboxd is Changing the way we think about Film Criticism

Today, finding and sharing opinions on movies is easier than it’s ever been. The film industry has grown hand in hand with - and to some degree, relies on - the circulation of film criticism to pique the interest of its audiences. Perpetuating this circulation of words and ratings on films has historically been the critics.. But the driving force of film criticism has been noticeably changed by the media platform Letterboxd, a new app which allows movie lovers and critics alike to publish and share their own ratings and reviews of films. The app grants easier access to casual criticism, while giving any movie lover the chance to have their opinions heard. But while Letterboxd has granted more casual access to the sphere of criticism, these affordances have led to a moral panic about the state of professional film criticism that is being addressed by the platform in increasingly paradoxical ways.

Letterboxd was launched in New Zealand in 2011 by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow with the purpose of connecting movie lovers based on an exchange of film opinions and reviews. Today, Letterboxd is easily the most popular app for movie watchers across the globe, with over 1 billion films logged by its users as of July 2022. Although the platform has seen minor interface changes since its release, the basic concept has remained the same: users are able to log movies they‘ve seen and leave their own personal reviews. But one of the most interesting aspects about this platform is that it still manages to weave in more conventional social media elements. Users are able to follow each other while having the ability to like and comment on reviews and ratings left by their friends. Although it’s required to have an account to post and interact on the platform, reviews can also be seen by others who don’t have an account and are just browsing on the app.

Based on these core elements alone, it’s clear that this platform affords the average movie watcher the ability to express their own thoughts and feelings on a film in a casual way that has flavors of other social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. In the same way someone would post a clip on TikTok or an image on Instagram, movie lovers can very casually add reviews to their page for others to see and review. Rather than needing an official media outlet to publish your work as a critic of the past, anyone with a Letterboxd account can now share their thoughts and opinions on an official platform with the click of a button. These elements also create a casual tone to the app; posting on Letterboxd isn’t like sending a final draft of your writing to your editor, you’re simply posting on a social media app to receive likes and comments, something many of us have done dozens of times. Your writing doesn’t have to be perfect or polished to get noticed, it just has to be posted to your profile.

But despite having the staple features of a social media platform, there’s one thing Letterboxd lacks which truly allows for the use of any users to rise to the top: an explore page. With the explore page and For You pages on Instagram and TikTok, respectively, users are able to scroll through content which the algorithm deems to be similar to the user’s existing tastes. On both of these apps, much of this content includes verified accounts from big names and mainstream content. While this concept may be helpful when you’re scrolling through memes or dance compilations, it can undermine the inclusive environment that Letterboxd offers by pushing out individual novice writers in favor of big name critics that are on the app. By opting out of the explore page trend that exists on other platforms, Letterboxd is able to maintain its casual social media environment while creating a level playing field which allows big names and smaller accounts to receive the same amount of traffic. This ultimately levels the playing field between big name critics and casual users.

My most popular review on Letterboxd (linked here), amassed over 70 likes and a multitude of comments, which stacks up pretty well against the 200-300 comments many of the official critics who use the app get. The movie at hand, John Chu’s 2021 summer musical release In The Heights, was one that I watched opening night in order to release the review while the film was still hot. When people searched the film on the app to get audience reactions, my review was able to get a lot of traffic since the most recent and reacted-to posts are able to rise to the top rather than just the big name users who would immediately pop up on other platforms.

Despite the easy success and attention this platform can afford to aspiring critics and casual reviewers, the question of where - or if - the traditional critic fits into this intersection of social media and film criticism in our digital age continues to resurface. While Letterboxd grants users such as myself the ability to gain traction based solely on my content regardless of previous fame or credentials, the other side of this exchange is that established critics lose their merit. The accolades - published articles, popular blogs, premiere appearances, etc. - that seem to be official indicators that a critic is creditable and worthy of attention, don’t exactly transfer over to this new platformized world of user opinions.

Combined with a steady decline of traditional news media in favor of platforms and social media as modes to get information, this state of concern for the traditional state of criticism and news is rooted in communication scholar Nancy Baym’s definition of “moral panic” (Baym). Baym’s concept of moral panic is primarily rooted in the idea that new media (everything from the invention of the car to the onset of the internet) can often corrupt innocent, pure bodies such as children who are exposed to the harmful effects of new media. But for the purpose of this analysis, I’d like to view traditional journalism - mainly print or online subscriptions to big name outlets - as something which is seen as “pure” in the eye of the news consuming public. Traditional criticism is analogous to the child, which can be led astray and spiral out of control when exposed to new media, in this case platforms like Letterboxd, which transform the very landscape of what it means to create meaningful and relevant criticism in a professional manner. It pushes this writing form towards a more casual, social media driven direction. This new media serves as a catalyst for change in an industry that has remained largely the same for decades, something which some believe may put the state of film criticism and journalism at jeopardy. For instance, Letterboxd user Mia Vicino - an amateur critic who started her account in 2019 as an undergrad - has over twice the amount of followers on her page as renowned critic for The Atlantic David Sims.

But Nancy Baym assures us that these doubts and worries about new media and their practices are standard. This moral panic we experience is all part of the public phenomenon of technological determinism.When new media is introduced, the public can often be skeptical and determined that this new technology will corrupt existing infrastructures. Rhetorics get spun surrounding new media and technology as they change our existing landscapes and, according to Baym, “[t]hese rhetorics are predictable, and tell us as much - if not more - about society than they tell us about technologies. They point to our deep need to trust, connect with, and protect one another and ourselves, and the perpetual struggles these needs engender” (Baym). According to this analysis, the fear that some feel in response to the migration of film criticism to a more casual and media based platform may really just reflect our own insecurity about the slow fade of journalism. By presenting a refreshing and successful new alternative to traditional criticism in newspapers and journals, it forces those that are used to journalism of the past to confront vibrant alternatives to what can be a revitalization of newspaper based film criticism.

However, we can’t ignore the other side to Baym’s theory of technological determinism, in that recognizing the potential downsides to new technology can often lead us to the development of policies and procedures which govern our new media use. Although new media has the power to present these new alternatives, the users ultimately have final say on how we use the technology around us. This lens is empowering, but can lead to changes and approaches which can be as puzzling as they are helpful. In American sociologist Claude Fischer’s America Calling, he explains that “[u]sers try to put a new technology to their own ends, which can lead to paradoxical outcomes not easily deducible from the straightforward logic of the technology” (Fischer). Moving back to Letterboxd, we can find these “paradoxical outcomes” that Fischer describes being used today to recreate the boundary between amateur and “professional” film critics.

On a platform designed to place everyone’s writing on an equal playing field, Letterboxd has seemingly begun to resurrect the critic hierarchy previously present in print journalism through the “patron” tag. On pages for official critics who have official jobs with major media outlets, letterboxd will grant them a small blue tag next to their username that says “patron”, indicating that that specific user is a frequent contributor to the community through official reviews and links to their home newspaper. Essentially, this tag serves a similar purpose to the “check” that is featured on verified Instagram and Twitter profiles. Critics like the previously mentioned David Sims and The New York Times critic Robert Daniels have patron tags as well as more polished looking home pages that are flashier and draw more attention to the authenticity of a single person’s page (my own profile is linked here for reference). In a comedic paradox of events, the platform designed to give everyone an equal voice in film criticism has now created an indicator to draw attention to official critics that have big names in the industry.

While we can almost sit back and laugh at the paradoxical way that Letterboxd has addressed the frantic moral panic of film critics across the country at the thought of undergrad students getting more clicks than them, it can be quite disheartening to see the regression of an app which once afforded movie lovers a free reign platform to express thoughts and opinions at the same level as our favorite critics. But although Letterboxd has reeled back its originally liberating platform, aspiring film critics have had a taste of the potential for a new type of film analysis and criticism that will undoubtedly influence the next generation of film media.