Letterboxd is a website and app where people go to track movies, review them, and share their general love of the medium and its history. Unsatisfied with Letterboxd just being a popular thing online that people like, the Canadian holding company Tiny, which owns a controlling stake in the site, is apparently trying to shop itself around to some of the biggest entertainment corpos around, including Netflix.
That’s according to a new report by Puck (via Variety), which claims Letterboxd’s owners have held early sale talks with the streaming giant, as well as Sony Pictures Entertainment, David Ellison’s Paramount Skydance, and private-equity giant TPG. All of those options sound awful.
Versant, which owns Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes, is also reportedly interested. Letterboxd joining that club would at least see it avoid the obvious conflicts of interest inherent in an entertainment company owning a platform where people have conversations about entertainment. You wouldn’t want Xbox owning Metacritic or PlayStation having GameFAQs, for example.
But the idea of big companies buying Letterboxd also leads to broader concerns about the enshittification of the internet’s last remaining refuges from algorithm-fueled engagement bait and slop. That’s particularly true with a potential sale to Netflix, which seems keen to lumber its way into podcasts, short-form video, and more in its insatiable appetite for growth.
Netflix is reportedly even looking at introducing live programming to its streaming bundle. Yes, having killed cable and Hollywood, its latest idea to keep subscribers hooked after repeatedly raising prices is to take us back to the days of flipping through cable before settling on watching The Shawshank Redemption for the eleventh time.
Adding a movie blogging platform to the mix, potentially integrated directly into the Netflix app, sounds like throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks. And it could break another one of the last cool places online in the process.