🍿 Boxd clever

Just a couple of months or so after a Times piece broke the news that Letterboxd — a social media network where ~30 million users log and review movies they’ve watched — had been attracting takeover interest from a host of names in the entertainment industry, it seems that the Grey Lady herself is now leading the charge. 

Last week, the NYT reported that its parent company had entered into advanced talks to buy the platform for around $330 million. Letterboxd reps and The New York Times Company chose to take non-speaking roles in the report, though sources close to the discussions were on hand to add color.

Apparently, Sony Pictures and ever-popular artsy production house A24 had both been circling the platform, with the latter dropping out as the potential takeover bids rose. For its part in the now exclusive negotiations, the Times Company has reportedly discussed keeping Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow at the helm, the pair having launched Letterboxd together at a Brooklyn web conference in 2011.

At the time, the final installment in the Harry Potter movie franchise was topping the box office. The media landscape has changed a bit since. For instance, never has the artist’s eternal “everyone’s a critic” complaint been truer, as platforms like Letterboxd and the Amazon-owned Goodreads have almost gamified art consumption; films are something to log, books are something to shelve.

Just looking at Letterboxd’s analytics gives you a decent picture of how the business of letting cinephiles record and review their latest watches has boomed in recent years.

Given how user figures have ballooned since the pandemic era, with each metric in Letterboxd’s annual year-end review rising at least four times from 2020 to 2025, it’s little wonder that some within the industry have started to refer to younger fervent film fans as the “Letterboxd Generation.”

The rising popularity of platform features such as “Four Favorites,” now a mainstay question for celebs stopped on red carpets and stuck in press junkets, as well as getting one of the biggest names in media onboard, makes it hard to imagine a world where Letterboxd users aren’t logging 1 billion+ movies on the platform each year at some point in the near future. 

The Takeaway 

As The New York Times Company’s metamorphosis from a news peddler to games-entertainment-product reviews-and-recipes behemoth that runs a side gig sending reporters to war zones continues, deals like this only make more sense. 

In fairness, the company behind America’s paper of record has provided much more than the news for a while now, having long realized that it needs more than straight reporting to keep modern audiences engaged (and paying up) in the digital age.

Indeed, just like Letterboxd hopes that the financial backing and increased visibility from any potential sale will help juice their user numbers and boost its revenue, the Times likely views the Letterboxd deal — like the acquisitions of Wordle and The Athletic before it — as another potential stepping stone towards its goal to 15 million subscribers by the end of 2027. 

— Thomas Jones

• 🏈 NFL: It’s an NFC East showdown tonight between the Washington Commanders and the New York Giants, with New York a 57% favorite. After several years at the bottom of the division, the Giants have inexplicably become the best team in the NFC East. 

• 🏀 NBA: A few weeks into the NBA season, the San Antonio Spurs are a 23% favorite to win the NBA Championship, followed by Oklahoma City at 15% and the Lebron James Philadelphia 76ers at 15%. 

*Event contracts are offered through Robinhood Derivatives, LLC — probabilities referenced or sourced from KalshiEx LLC, ForecastEX, LLC or Rothera Exchange and Clearing LLC.

According to a new Gallup poll conducted shortly after the failed execution of Christa Pike, support for the US death penalty hit its joint lowest point since 1971, as fewer than half of Americans reported being in favor of the punishment for those convicted of murder.

The aborted attempt in Tennessee might not have been the only factor playing on respondents’ minds at the time, however: the October 1 to October 19 survey period also covered a large stretch when Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan’s execution was still slated to be livestreamed, before the president called off the plans on the 15th. 

That’s the estimated record-breaking haul that Chinese retailers brought in last year across the busy Singles’ Day festival, a discount period not dissimilar to Black Friday and Cyber Monday in the US. 

Spearheaded in part by e-commerce giant Alibaba, the stretch of sales events originated with college students wanting to celebrate their singledom and is built largely around November 11 — the solitary figures in the 11/11 speaking for themselves. 

According to the AP, however, even the event itself hasn’t been attracting as much interest this year…

• Quarterly results from Applied Materials, Cerebras, Gemini Space Station, and Cisco due out after the close.