The owners of popular film review platform Letterboxd are looking to sell it on – to the very companies being critiqued every single day on the site.

Letterboxd has been quietly getting shopped around, with Netflix, Sony, and Paramount reportedly circling. The site, which has 30 million users rating and reviewing films across the entire breadth and history of the medium, is perhaps the last well-populated place online to get authentic audience reaction and opinion, following the community cratering of similar sites like IMDb (bought by Amazon) and Rotten Tomatoes (75% owned by NBCUniversal, 25% owned by Warner Bros).

For film studios, especially ones that peddle mainstream cinema that aim for the widest possible audience and appeal, the data these sites accumulate and hold onto is powerful and very, very valuable. The amount of data it can glean from user activity, from the opinions and ratings themselves to data that informs market demographics, is a complete dream for a studio’s marketing and decision-making.

It’s not hard to imagine what would happen if a frontrunner like Netflix took control of Letterboxd. Imagine logging on and seeing the latest produced by Netflix masterpiece (read as sarcasm, please) bannering the top of every page. Watch as negative reviews of in-house productions start getting flagged and buried or quietly reweighted by an engagement........

© Herald Scotland