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

Letterboxd, the app where film Twitter went to live, could soon have a new owner. According to a new report, The New York Times, A24, and Sony Pictures are among the suitors who've expressed interest in buying the site.

The asking price? More than $300M, per the Times' sources. That's roughly 20 times the approximately $15M Letterboxd is projected to earn this year. Not bad for a site started in 2011 by two New Zealand designers, Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, who were annoyed that movie lovers had nowhere decent to gather online.

The growth is honestly staggering. The site now has 30 million users, up from 1.8 million in 2020. Most people use it for free, but there are paid Pro ($19/year) and Patron ($49/year) tiers, plus ad revenue. Media analyst Ken Doctor summed up the appeal to the Times: an engaged audience that pays and that advertisers want to reach is "the gold standard of the internet."

My two cents: A24 buying Letterboxd would be the most on-brand acquisition imaginable, but also the messiest. Its movies get rated on the platform every single day, and the conflict-of-interest questions write themselves. Same goes for Sony. The Times makes the most sense on paper, but it has its own critics.