Letterboxd Is Up for Sale, and A24, Sony and the New York Times Are Bidding

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’aitre 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

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.

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

Amazing. So Imdb 2.0 has become Imdb 2.0.

America hasn’t had real antitrust law for >40 years. It should be impossible for a review site to be purchased by a company that makes things reviewed on that site. Reagan era neoliberalism defanged antitrust, and brought on the corpo-hellscape we live in today.

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

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

Damn, that asking price is insane

Can't wait for the enshittification of Letterboxd.

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

Heh, the name makes it sound like a daemon.

service letterboxd enable; service letterboxd start

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?

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

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

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.