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The Letterboxd “Video Store” will open on Wednesday, December 10. Let’s fucking go.
As my Gizmodo colleague, Lucas Ropek, wrote last month when this feature was announced:
It’s certainly a pleasant turn of events for the popular film site—and perhaps not what most users had been expecting after its acquisition by Tiny, a large Canadian holding company, which purchased the site for $50 million in 2023. Usually, when a big company buys a scrappy little site, bad things happen. However, since Tiny took over at Letterboxd, the site has only continued to thrive and change in largely positive ways. A new rental integration seems like just the ticket to keep users coming back for more.
And Lucas was, and remains, correct. People say we’re too negative at Gizmodo, but as more details have emerged about what Letterboxd is trying to do here, this is just sounding cooler and cooler, to the point where there is simply nothing to be snarky about—except maybe some of the higher fees involved, but we’ll see if even that turns out to be worth it.
According to Variety, Video Store titles will cost between $3.99 and $19.99(!) to rent in the U.S., with the same 48-hour viewing window as other paid streaming-on-demand services that let viewers “rent” content. Pricing will vary based on territory—with some intended to be Letterboxd exclusives for a given country.
Which brings us to why this looks so good: the curation.
At launch there will be only nine movies to choose from—perfect for an intense marathon weekend of movie-mainlining. Four of them are previously unreleased titles, and judging from the latest Letterboxd blog post about Video Store, they (mostly) look extremely promising.
The “Store” will be divided into two “shelves.” One called “Unreleased Gems,” and one called “Lost & Found.” Here is the “Unreleased Gems” shelf:
Variety says the “Lost & Found” shelf will include the following: Tiger on the Beat, a 1988 Chow Yun-Fat movie directed by Lau Kar-Leung; Kisapmata from 1981, often called the greatest Filipino film of all time; It Must Be Heaven, a 2019 absurdist comedy/drama about a Palestinian man traveling abroad; Poison, Todd Haynes’ notorious 1991 provocation and the film that made his career; and Before We Vanish, Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s 2017 Invasion of the Body Snatchers riff.
If you’re an elite Letterboxd user, you should have logged or watchlisted all of these already or else what are you even doing?
In terms of how to stream, the FAQ provided by Letterboxd gives you a limited list of options: An Apple TV app, or beam the movie of your choice to your TV from a browser via Apple AirPlay or Chromecast. A very noticeable omission from that list is Roku.
At any rate, if you use Letterboxd, prepare to see these movies organically show up in your friends’ user activity, sparking your curiosity and FOMO.
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Source: Gizmodo