How Letterboxd Captured Young Moviegoers — and Martin Scorsese
22.11.2023 - 18:51
/ variety.com
J. Kim Murphy Cristiano Ronaldo has the most followers on Instagram. Elon Musk claims that title on his platform X (naturally).
And Letterboxd has Martin Scorsese. When he joined in October, shortly after his film “Killers of the Flower Moon” hit theaters, the director quickly became the most-followed account on the burgeoning social media platform, which allows users to rate and review movies, create lists and follow their friends. The director — or whichever canny member of his team is behind the account — doesn’t use the platform as a viewing diary though.
Scorsese’s inaugural post was a list of 59 titles cited as companion texts to his own work. In the weeks since, he’s shared a second list of his favorite wide-screen movies. Scorsese will draw a crowd, but it’s still a bit of an anomaly for an octogenarian to become the most popular account on a social media platform — especially given Letterboxd’s notably younger-skewing audience.
Founded in 2011, the platform exploded during the COVID pandemic; it now boasts more than 10 million accounts — five times its size in 2019. But even as those numbers keep climbing, the company says its age demographics haven’t really shifted. Half of the platform’s active users are under 35, and more than half of that group is between 16 and 24.
What’s more, a look at Letterboxd’s annual year-in-review statistics reveals that the portion of current-year releases across all logged films routinely falls below 24%. That means people aren’t just joining the platform to fire off star ratings for “Barbie” or “Five Nights at Freddy’s” — they are more often weighing in on older films. For the repertory film programming scene in Los Angeles, which was largely shuttered during the pandemic,
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