Letterboxd announces curated online film rental store

Letterboxd – a film tracker app and the only good social network – announced a Letterboxd Video Store at the Festival de Cannes on Tuesday. Unlike a traditional video-on-demand service, Letterboxd Video Store will offer “limited festival-style windows” when you can stream “festival favorites, underseen gems, global cinema, and emerging voices” in cinema. 

The service is even exploring limited runs of films that haven’t yet scored widespread distribution, which would make your dream watchlist that more attainable.

When does it launch? What are the first selections? Which territories will it be available in? Will it be that compromised by Trump’s wacky tariff ideas? We do not yet know. But Letterboxd does promise that the selections will be curated by the Letterboxd team leveraging “behavioral insight” gathered from the 20 million users logging, reviewing, and discoursing on its service. 

Given that Letterboxd’s film blog Journal is good actually, I trust this combination of personal curation and “community enthusiasm.” It’s a welcome addition to the curated streaming service space where Criterion and Mubi live, for those of us with Netflix fatigue and a yet-undetermined amount of bucks to spare.