With over 8 million users – larger than the population of New Zealand – Letterboxd is the world’s leading social media platform when it comes to films and is based in Aotearoa. We chat to the cinephiles, Matthew Buchanan and Gemma Gracewood, behind the platform influencing the trajectory of Hollywood films.

It may seem hard to believe that a platform like Letterboxd from New Zealand has large enough impact to sway an industry worth billions, but it’s true.

An idea born from Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow in late 2011, Letterboxd is a platform that allows similar cinephiles to catalog films, inspired by platforms like Flickr and last.fm.

“I think the idea of a film diary where you log the films that you watch and a list making tool, those two, combined with the ability to write reviews and discuss films with others in the community, really instilled the idea,” Buchanan says.

The tech entrepreneurs who were running a studio at the time, making websites and apps for clients, decided to work towards the idea in their spare time.

Within nine months, Letterboxd was a reality, and being a product of the studio with no capital or marketing budget, the platform was able to grow a community organically, focusing on building features for the users.

“The product that we have today still very closely resembles the product that we launched with, although the product has become more mature as a platform,” says Buchanan.

Buchanan takes pride in the community the platform has built which allows users to submit feedback.

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A particular feature that Letterboxd is popular for is the ability to review and log movies more than once. It’s even had a user log and review a movie for 365 days straight, as well as one who watched Hunt for the Wilderpeople every day for a year.

“What I really appreciate about the platform, especially as someone who in my other life as a director, producer, is the way in which it’s providing an alternate history of film criticism of certain films that were maybe mis-marketed the first time around or the people who reviewed it the first time around when it came out were all newspapermen with a singular worldview or not particularly diverse worldview,” says Gemma Gracewood, editor-in-chief of the platform.

“And so you see a lot of movies taking on a whole other life of appreciation.”

Since 2011, Letterboxd as a platform has grown organically to the point of being considered mainstream, just before the pandemic when they recorded 1.8 million users.

Buchanan and Gracewood say the virality of the platform can be attributed to the virality of other platforms such as YouTube and TikTok, but ultimately it came down to the product.

“You build a good product, and you present it well on all of the social media that we do, and we struck a chord. Your audience grows itself by preaching about how much they enjoy it,” he adds.

Over the pandemic, Letterboxd became an even bigger sensation, with Gracewood attributing to “pandemic-specific behaviour” of people looking for alternate ways to bring “a sense of order and progression during lockdown”.

With over eight million users, Letterboxd has a pin on Hollywood and what movies become successful out of the industry despite being a 12 hour flight away.

Buchanan says the hold they have on Hollywood is because they take a modern look at interacting with the traditional media form.

“With traditional media, it’s always an arm’s length, but I think with us, we’re able to bring the questions from our community and pose them straight to the filmmakers,” he adds.

“We just had the directors of Everything, Everywhere, All at Once reading Letterboxd reviews on camera and reacting to them. What a thrill for the writers of those reviews and what a fun thing for two Oscar nominated film directors to agree to, from our humble beginnings in a Newmarket office 10 years ago.”

Gracewood says that the pandemic has changed things for the industry as a whole and Hollywood is going to want to look at any platform with data from audiences.

She adds that many users are writers, directors, producers and more who are in the industry, who are looking at the platform as a place for creative influence.

“I think we never lose sight of the fact that it’s been quite a crazy trip so far, and now we’re in a really good spot to be able to potentially have some influence,” says Buchanan.

Despite New Zealand being a small island at the bottom of the Southern Hemisphere, the tech scene in Aotearoa is competing with the big players, inventing large platforms and technology that Hollywood needs.

Everything from Weta who have changed the way digital films are made, to more recent companies like Movieo and Shift72.

“No offense to people who live in Silicon Valley, but there is something about being New Zealanders, having a New Zealand sensibility, a New Zealand sense of empathy and fairness, and ‘let’s throw something at the wall and see what happens’, that is built into the architecture of Letterboxd versus any other major social media platform out there,” she adds.

“People make movies, people watch movies, people write about movies. People are at the heart of what we do. I don’t know that that’s particularly unique in social media, but I do think that that New Zealand voice that began it all, and that sensibility is part of its success.”