Letterboxd Is Up for Sale, and A24, Sony and the New York Times Are Bidding (worldofreel.com)

49 pointsby crossroadsguy3 hours ago23 comments

reticulates 44 minutes ago

I continue to be baffled by this sale. Letterboxd was acquired by Tiny 3 years ago, Tiny’s entire premise is that they hold for the long term. Selling after 3 years is not long term. I don’t understand why Tiny would undermine their raison d’etre unless it’s because the founders (who retain a minority stake) are pushing for it.

Tiny just recently updated their website to emphasize how long they’ve owned each property which is especially confusing given they’re now offloading things https://tiny.com/companies/letterboxd

“Tiny's model — long-term ownership, founder autonomy, no pressure to flip the company in three to five years — fit naturally.”

…?

OzzyB 39 minutes ago

so you _believed_ them -- that is the only takeaway from this.

Grombobulous 22 minutes ago

I imagine that in life and business there’s no such thing as a decision that is never regrettable. I guess it just didn’t work out.

rdmuser 2 hours ago

Having such a high profile film rating site be potentially owned by a film studio has serious conflict of interest issues. Same goes for amazon buying imdb and they've already used that to adjust scores for at least one film they released because of bad reviews. I'm happy to see this get some attention here after my submission didn't because the potential implications of this purchase are big.

Edit: I believe I made an error re the claim imdb changed the score of at least one of amazons films. See replies for more info. Apologies!

aucisson_masque 38 minutes ago

> Same goes for amazon buying imdb and they've already used that to adjust scores for at least one film they released

Any source on that ? I found nothing serious, just reddit and Facebook post. No one serious is reporting on it.

madeofpalk 14 minutes ago

The problem with Amazon owning IMDB, or A24 potentially owning Letterboxd, is not that they would screw with it, but that every move they make will be put through that lease. Even with NYT being the owners I’m sure there would be the regular ‘drama’ of whatever woke/anti-woke influence they may have over it.

rdmuser 10 minutes ago

Ah actually unfortunately I think I made a mistake there so I apologize for that. Should have double checked instead of speaking from memory. I believe I was thinking of The Little Mermaid change but it seems like that wasn't their film. Sorry!

https://www.avclub.com/the-little-mermaid-imdb-changes-ratin...

clayhacks 2 hours ago

Is there an ATproto or activity pub version of letterboxd? I like A24, but not sure how much I trust Sony or the NYT to run it reasonably

rurban an hour ago

A24 is the biggest cheater on Letterboxd, buying 5 star raters en masse. Warner is not much better. Sony is ok.

madeofpalk 44 minutes ago

What 5 start ratings have they purchased?

zoenolan an hour ago

https://popfeed.social/ on ATproto

DarkNova6 2 hours ago

Amazing. So Imdb 2.0 has become Imdb 2.0.

Computer0 2 hours ago

I use https://movielens.org/ and it is ran by the University of Minnesota.

PyWoody 38 minutes ago

This looks almost too good to be true! Thank you for sharing. I'm going to migrate my 600+ library over tonight.

kkotak 37 minutes ago

Why not $3B? or $30B, even?

dgellow an hour ago

Damn, that asking price is insane

hotsalad an hour ago

Heh, the name makes it sound like a daemon.

service letterboxd enable; service letterboxd start

535188B17C93743 2 hours ago

Can't wait for the enshittification of Letterboxd.

Dear God, don't let Amazon do what it did to Goodreads here.

mpalmer 2 hours ago

Truly, everything good gets milked dry for someone's exit. I know that's usually celebrated in a forum like this, but is it possible things are just a bit out of balance?

thrownaway561 an hour ago

so glad I move over to TMDB the other day. Letterboxd layout is the worst.

ChrisArchitect an hour ago

Referenced NYT piece (unlocked): https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/business/media/letterboxd...

Related background on the state of growth there from a few months ago:

The Rise and (Potential) Fall of Letterboxd

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463894

sajithdilshan an hour ago

If it's bought by A24 or Sony that's absolutely gonna be a conflict on interest and I cannot imagine the platform would ever be impartial for the reviews of their movies. It NYT buys it, then it would be turned into a woke nonsense project. I guess all good things must come to an end.

nimih an hour ago

part of the charm of letterboxd is that its median reviewer is far more woke than every NYT contributor combined, imo.