The Fight That Nearly Destroyed the Letterboxd Community
That includes the team who made the decision. “The End of Evangelion is both part of a much wider story and a work of art on its own,” says Letterboxd’s editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood. “In this case, we recognize that our list moderators strive to maintain a Top 250 that enables film lovers to discover a century of largely standalone cinematic excellence, without having necessarily to rely on deep prior knowledge of a TV show.”
This highly-involved definition is typical for Letterboxd, which has dealt with quieter debates on similar topics for years. The platform allows users to review miniseries and TV movies but not regular TV shows (for the moment). In the words of one of its founders, the decision was made to avoid “film-logging being overrun by people binge-watching Friends,” but edge cases will always exist. What happens when a miniseries gets a second season? If a show has feature-length episodes, are they all TV movies?
To quote Megalopolis, the new contentious movie by Letterboxd user Francis Ford Coppola, the debate is what really matters. These are the kinds of highly technical, unabashedly nerdy disagreements that form the bedrock of virtually every internet community. “Film nerds love to rank things,” says film journalist Brandon Streussnig. “We all love making our little lists and when a list doesn’t reflect ours, that personal annoyance creeps in even if it’s irrational.”
Streussnig also notes there’s another emotional component: the movie itself. “[End of Evangelion is] a film that means more to the people who love it than almost anything. It hits them on an almost existential level. So to be told that it doesn’t qualify as a film because of some made-up reason, [and] therefore can’t be classified among the greats, stings.”
All this is why Letterboxd has found so much success in the first place. Fifteen million users may not sound like a very impressive base for a social platform, but it’s enormous for such a niche and specific community. Ever since IMDB shut down its message boards in 2017, Letterboxd has taken its place as the center of gravity for film fans online. Actors now regularly list their top four films on press tours. Luminaries like Rian Johnson and Ayo Edebiri have active, opinionated accounts, and last month John Carpenter had to personally confirm that he was being impersonated on the platform.
As it grows, so does the magnitude of its decisions. Letterboxd has had to reverse course before: After months of deleting any reviews of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Letterboxd officially listed it in December 2017, after the Museum of Modern Art and Cahiers du Cinéma both called it one of the year’s best films.
With End of Evangelion, there wasn’t any higher authority—the decision was entirely down to Letterboxd. Gracewood describes it as an all-hands-on-deck moment, convening “members of the list moderating team with our editorial, social, community, and data teams to consider various aspects of the decision.”
Ultimately, after “a smooth and quick process,” End of Evangelion returned to the top lists after less than 48 hours. Letterboxd’s users were happy with the decision, but no one expected the reconciliation to last very long. “We know this won’t be the last time our community will let us know what they think,” Gracewood says. It’s an acknowledgement that this is an inevitable part of the space they’ve cultivated. A social network dedicated to organization and art critique needs to respond to critiques of how they organize things.
Sure enough, on October 7, the anime film Perfect Blue passed The Thing to take the No. 1 spot the platform’s list of top-rated horror movies. At time of writing, hundreds of commenters on X, Reddit, and Letterboxd itself are going back and forth over whether the film qualifies as horror. At least everyone agrees it’s a film this time.
