What were the best movies of 2024? Film buffs are turning to Letterboxd to make their picks
With the Oscars approaching, the site’s 17 million users are reviewing, logging, and rating like never before.
As the 2025 Oscar nominations rolled in yesterday, many probably turned to movie review sites to gauge the public’s perception of the films that made the cut — those they loved, those they hated, and those they couldn’t believe got a nod (“Better Man”, anyone?).
For years, the place where film fans would congregate to rate and berate was IMDb. While the platform remains the “world’s most popular and authoritative source for movie, TV and celebrity content,” per its website, new, burgeoning rivals in the armchair critic space threaten to unseat the database from its reviewing throne — just as IMDb’s founder and CEO departs after 35 years at the Amazon-owned company.
Enter Letterboxd: a film-cataloging social media site. Initially embraced by die-hard cinephiles when it launched in 2011, the platform spent more than a decade in the internet’s wilderness before enjoying a meteoric rise in the last few years.
As outlined in a great article by Robert Steiner, published by Variety earlier this week, Letterboxd now counts more than 17 million users, according to its most recent end-of-year report, up from 1.8 million just four years ago. Not only has its user base boomed, particularly postpandemic, but the platform’s engagement has also skyrocketed. Last year, 96.4 million reviews were posted on the site — more than 100x the figure recorded a decade prior — with the number of films watched, ratings, lists, and comments doubling in the past two years alone.
But how has Letterboxd managed to break into the mainstream from being an indie darling?
Well, in short: virality. While the fun of logging and rating movies watched — or having another source of inspiration for what to watch on a Tuesday night — might be what keeps users coming back, Letterboxd has also targeted the social experience to grow its user base. As described by Rachel Lee to GQ last year, the site has tapped into “the Gen Z phenomenon of ‘the memeification of everything’” — up to and including interviewers asking for “Four Favorites” on red carpets, leaked celebrity accounts, and, of course, hilarious viral reviews.
So, with awards season upon us, what defined the movies that millions of critical cinephiles rated most highly in 2024? Sandworms, shipwrecked robots, and, er, hundreds of beavers.
