Majority stake in NZ-based movie fan site Letterboxd sold

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Letterboxd began out of New Zealand in 2011.
Photo: Supplied

New Zealand-based film social media site Letterboxd has been acquired by a Canadian technology company for a deal that reportedly values the company at NZ$83 million.

The site, founded in 2011 by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, is an online-movie diary and rating platform and app that allows film lovers to keep a record of what they watch and publish their own reviews.

It has become a huge success working as a sort of GoodReads for movie lovers and has topped 10 million registered accounts across more than 200 countries, with its popularity skyrocketing during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Among celebrity users of Letterboxd are Barbie star Margot Robbie and Knives Out director Rian Johnson.

Tiny, based in British Columbia, has made a majority acquisition of 60 percent of Letterboxd in a deal that values Letterboxd at about US$50m (NZ$83m), according to reporting by media including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and New York Times.

“Teaming up with Tiny represents a big leap forward for us,” said Buchanan and von Randow in a press release.

“We see this as a huge win for our community, enabling us to cement Letterboxd’s future with additional resources without sacrificing the DNA of what makes it special.”

Letterboxd is free, although it has paid membership tiers. The site has 16 full-time employees and a dozen part-timers, according to The New York Times.

“We’ve been huge fans and users of Letterboxd for a long time and could not be more excited to join forces with Matthew, Karl, and the rest of the team for the long term,” Andrew Wilkinson, co-founder of Tiny, said in a statement.

In an essay on Letterboxd, Buchanan wrote that the site is driven by his lifelong love of film, with memories of “Air-freighted copies of Empire to keep up with the new releases that would eventually make their way to New Zealand shores six to nine months later, if at all”.

Buchanan said he want to keep the site’s focus on community and that “very little else will change” with Tiny’s acquisition.

“In some ways, it’s like we’ve been making great shorts for over a decade, and now we have the dream team for our first feature.”