Letterboxd: 2026 TIME100 Most Influential Companies

The film discovery and review platform Letterboxd is best known as the social-media app for cinephiles, but now it’s also helping indie movies reach wider audiences. Founded by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow in 2011, the Auckland-based company’s wave of pandemic-era growth set the stage for greater influence: from January 2019 to January 2021, users jumped from more than 1 million to more than 3 million. By April 2026, that number had grown to more than 28 million across more than 190 countries. (Last year alone, users published more than 143 million reviews and logged nearly 900 million films.) Letterboxd’s immense reach, particularly among young people—more than half of its users are under 35—now shapes the film industry directly. Everything Everywhere All at Once directing duo The Daniels attributed the film’s early success to a groundswell of Letterboxd enthusiasm. When A24’s The Brutalist was released in 2024, nearly half the opening-weekend audience had reportedly heard about the film on the app. NBCUniversal chairperson Donna Langley has dubbed young moviegoers “the Letterboxd generation” and credited the platform with boosting repeat viewings of Oppenheimer attendance. Major industry players—from Anora director Sean Baker to musician and actor Charli XCX—are Letterboxd users themselves. 
In December 2025, the company launched its Letterboxd Video Store, a TVOD rental platform surfacing films not easily available elsewhere. (In January, after just eight days on Video Store, the Gen Z road thriller It Ends was picked up by Neon.) This year, Letterboxd will include seasons of television for the first time, though the addition will exist in its own silo on the app. “We want to be very careful not to upset the experience for film purists,” Buchanan says. Canadian holding company Tiny is now reportedly exploring a sale of Letterboxd. “There’s nothing specific for us to share at this time,” a representative for Letterboxd said in response. “Any decision about Letterboxd’s future would involve the founders.”