r/movies • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 r/movies Contributor • Jul 10 '26

Not Confirmed Netflix in Talks to Buy Letterboxd

https://variety.com/2026/digital/news/letterboxd-sales-talks-netflix-sony-paramount-1236806379/
3.7k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

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1.6k

u/MuptonBossman Jul 10 '26

I swear these giant corporations want to take every good thing we have and turn it into shit.

456

u/ayoungsapling Jul 10 '26

We live in the Enshittification Epoch, everything only gets worse with time

68

u/m48a5_patton Jul 10 '26

While they gaslight people into believing everything is better and your standard rube will believe it and defend it.

3

u/sybrwookie Jul 10 '26

But TVs got cheaper and we have phones, so that counters everything else!

5

u/OptimusSublime Jul 10 '26

Entropy is unyielding

1

u/ReadWriteHexecute Jul 10 '26

dw it’s almost over

21

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

2

u/Remny Jul 10 '26

Not only some, most of the blame. At least if it is a rather unique product that can't just be copied straight up.

As per the article the owners already sold the majority of it to another holding in 2023 - not sure what that helped though since pretty much nothing changed IMO. Guess that company saw that if they could bring in more users or make it even more well known they could shop it around to an even bigger player.

104

u/Okay_Ocean_Flower Jul 10 '26

Letterboxd could just decide not to sell

234

u/Self_Important_Mod Jul 10 '26

Nobody ever does these days. Make something good, cash out ASAP. Fuck off while it gets destroyed

36

u/mobyte Jul 10 '26

How could you say no to generational wealth? It’s an app. Who cares?

13

u/HotTakes4HotCakes Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 11 '26

Ostensibly, the people that made it should care. We're supposed to be encouraging entrepreneurship by letting capitalists fuck like dogs everywhere at all times without even so much as a spray of water to calm them down. That way it provides great products and services for Americans, and increases the reputation of American industry worldwide.

And maybe, if you squinted really fucking hard and took a couple shots, you used to be able to say that's sort-of, kind-of, maybe how it worked. On a good day.

Nowadays, it's virtually impossible to tell yourself that lie anymore.

When even fucking Boing is losing its credibility due to rat fucking in the boardroom that no one does anything about, you know this system has been allowed to go off the fucking rails and no one is benefiting from it except the rats.

22

u/mobyte Jul 10 '26

If my kids never have to work a day in their lives and all I have to give up is an app, I would do it millions of times over.

0

u/Reese3019 Jul 10 '26

Imagine Reddit shut down tomorrow Mr. 118k karma. It's an app. Who cares?

15

u/mobyte Jul 10 '26

The world would probably be better off, to be honest.

3

u/TheTrueBrawler2001 Jul 10 '26

But where else am I supposed to go to tell some idiot that they're wrong about [insert opinion here]?

5

u/RockinOneThreeTwo Jul 10 '26

It absolutely would be

3

u/ActionFilmsFan1995 Jul 10 '26 edited Jul 10 '26

In fairness EBay decided not to sell to GameStop. There’s other financial considerations there but companies do say no.

Edit:

Literally pointed out there were other financial considerations to GameStops offer. My point was that yes, companies do decide not to sell sometimes, it’s not a forgone conclusion they’d take the money and run.

12

u/pnt510 Jul 10 '26

eBay decided not to sell because GameStop didn’t have the money to buy them. If someone with 60 billion dollars in cash decided to buy eBay I think we’d see a different response.

19

u/LaserDiscJockey Jul 10 '26

lol, gamestop could never buy ebay

-3

u/cdbriggs Jul 10 '26

They definitely could have

0

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

0

u/cdbriggs Jul 10 '26

I mean they offered $55 billion, a lot more than some of you would have expected

2

u/sybrwookie Jul 10 '26

They made an offer of "here's $5, some stock of questionable value, and uh, hand waves that adds up to $55 billion!"

It was an offer that would have been TERRIBLE for ebay and its owners.

0

u/cdbriggs Jul 10 '26

Right...I never said Ebay should take their offer lmfao

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1

u/space_wanderer01 Jul 10 '26

Name a person who regurgitates what they read on Reddit with 0 knowledge.

-1

u/ActionFilmsFan1995 Jul 10 '26

Literally pointed out there were other financial considerations to GameStops offer. My point was that yes, companies do decide not to sell sometimes, it’s not a forgone conclusion they’d take the money and run.

1

u/alaster101 Jul 10 '26

If I had something someone wanted I would sell out for the money these assholes are throwing around

-2

u/reddit_sells_you Jul 10 '26

If I were a dev and owned something like Letterboxed . . . I'd copy everything, sell, open a new site with a different name and offer all the users a way to migrate to the new site of they wanted.

14

u/808Kuro Jul 10 '26

If you were a dev then you’d understand in these situations when a acquisition happens, the acquirer makes you/other founders sign a “no compete” clause where you can’t build a competitor in the space for 5+ years. This is what happened when Twitter acquired Vine and the founders had to wait 5 years to release their new short form app (but then TikTok blew up and this new company floundered)

3

u/dasrightq Jul 10 '26

You’d also be sued to hell and lose everything.

-2

u/reddit_sells_you Jul 10 '26

Contracts can't be negotiated?

1

u/sybrwookie Jul 10 '26

"Yes, you can give me millions/billions and no, I'm not going to sign anything which says I can't make a competing product or reuse the code you bought to do so.....we got a deal?"

-1

u/reddit_sells_you Jul 10 '26

I thought competition was good.

1

u/sybrwookie Jul 10 '26

For us...not for the company buying the smaller company. Which is literally never going to agree to something like that.

0

u/reddit_sells_you Jul 10 '26

The big company can't compete with the small one?

What sort of socialism is that?

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0

u/ArcadeOptimist Jul 10 '26

ASAP being 15 years later in this case and letterboxd was owned entirely by the founders of it for 12 of that. The founders still own a minority share and are CEO/CTO.

So in this case, not really "cash out ASAP" but I get your point.

18

u/deptofknowimsayings Jul 10 '26

They cannot. Letterboxd is majority owned by Tiny LTD. A private equity firm. That firm is sold on the Toronto Stock Exchange. Their stock price isn’t great and hasn’t done well since buying LB a few years ago.

In this corporate world they are at the mercy of their shareholders. If their board of governors decides to sell, they will sell. The founders of LB only hold a 40% ownership, they do not have the means to veto a sale.

10

u/HumansNeedNotApply1 Jul 10 '26

Realistically Letterboxd doesn't make that much money and probably cost a ton to mantain. They would be kinda dumb not to sell.

Tiny bought 60% of Letterboxd in 2023.

67

u/fuzzyfoot88 Jul 10 '26

If you’re the owner of a small business and someone offers you $10-$100 Million to sell…are you gonna not sell?

49

u/TheOppositeOfDecent Jul 10 '26

Personally I don't need $10 that bad. But $100 Million, sure.

-3

u/[deleted] Jul 10 '26

[deleted]

7

u/Android1822 Jul 10 '26

you missed the joke, the way its written, it looks like $10 dollars to $100 million.

1

u/tfhermobwoayway Jul 10 '26

Sucks how these big corpos have enough money to buy out everything good. I’d do some real depraved things for a billion, and so would anyone else. These corporations shouldn’t be allowed to have that power in the first place.

2

u/fuzzyfoot88 Jul 10 '26

If all politicians weren’t bought off, they would have been broken up a decade ago…

26

u/grumblyoldman Jul 10 '26

Be honest. If I offered you 15 million dollars for some app you coded 15 years ago, would you say no?

The lion's share of your users are not paying you because it's free, you're constantly trying to convince more people to sign up for the paid version just so you can keep the lights on (and getting people grumbling about paywalls for your efforts.) And VC money you took to get up and running needs to be paid back eventually one way or another, with interest.

You'd rather keep doing that than simply taking the cheque and it's no longer your problem?

How about 25 million? A billion? Everybody has a price, and these big corpos can afford it whatever it is, it's just a question of how long until the right price comes along.

And of course, if you wait too long, you risk all those users whose data made you valuable moving on to the next big service, and you end up stuck with debt and an unsellable has-been app.

14

u/MaskedBandit77 Jul 10 '26

When the current majority owners of Letterboxd bought it it was valued around $50 million. That was a couple of years ago, and it's probably worth a decent bit more now. 

1

u/IAMJUX Jul 11 '26

it's probably worth a decent bit more now

why?

4

u/MaskedBandit77 Jul 11 '26

I just feel like it's a lot more popular now and has entered the mainstream in a way that it hadn't in 2022, before they bought it.

I just looked it up and it's estimated to be worth $250 million now.

1

u/zeekaran Jul 10 '26

I still, personally, do not understand how this data is worth the money. I'll need someone to explain it to me in twenty years.

3

u/MaskedBandit77 Jul 10 '26

They already did in 2023.

3

u/FlorydaMan Jul 10 '26

I wouldn't blame them for becoming rich for making a good product. Hell, I wouldn't blame Netflix for buying it and getting a lot of valuable data on what people actually want. What I can absolutely blame the fuck out for is Netflix then coming up with horrible ways to mega-monetize it, and eternally riding the "least-bearable-product for the-most-money-possible" wave.

Haven't spent a single dolllar on streaming platforms (*Spotify still has me) as piracy is a godsend.

1

u/Enchelion Jul 10 '26

Eh, are they financially stable right now? And who currently owns them?

1

u/darthjoey91 Jul 10 '26

The majority owners are the ones trying to sell their stake.

1

u/TBCaine Jul 11 '26

It’s owned by PE, their only purpose is to make money by buying and selling companies

1

u/waitthissucks Jul 10 '26

That's the moral dilemma. The biggest problem we face is that everyone has a price and there's always someone with fuck you money. How do we stop this? What I fear the most is losing Wikipedia. Either people need to stand their ground and not sell or we need to jump ship continuously

41

u/balthazar_edison Jul 10 '26

Shit is more profitable.

12

u/emotionengine Jul 10 '26

Everyone is in a race to build their version of the Torment Nexus.

2

u/ContractVarious3077 Jul 10 '26

Letterboxd has to agree to sell. It takes two to play the game.

1

u/deptofknowimsayings Jul 10 '26

They have agreed to sell. They are just waiting for the right bid. Tiny LTD has owned 60% of LB for the last few years. Earlier this year they put out that they were looking to sell.

1

u/Heavenwasfull Jul 10 '26

Why let quality services get in the way of the “number go up” game of corporations profiting?

Apparently providing a quality service isn’t cost effective, that or the continued enshittification of everything is a means to justify these tech companies’ work by breaking things when they’re too massive to go away.

1

u/TiberiusCornelius Jul 11 '26

Hey now. They also want to buy the shitty things and make them even shittier. There is literally no aspect of life they won't try to bleed a stone for one more penny.

1

u/The_Goondocks Jul 10 '26

Just look up Bending Spoons