NEW YORK TIMES WANTS TO PAY $330 MILLION FOR LETTERBOXD

The New York Times Company is in exclusive talks to buy Letterboxd for about $330 million, the going rate for a website where people give Paddington 2 five stars and Citizen Kane three and a half to seem interesting. The Times already owns Wordle, Wirecutter and The Athletic. The paper of record is slowly becoming a bundle of apps with a newsroom stapled to the side. The price is more than 20 times Letterboxd's projected 2026 earnings of roughly $15 million. Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow started it in New Zealand back in 2011 as a movie diary, and it has gone from under 2 million users in 2020 to about 30 million now. Tiny, the Canadian company holding the controlling stake, bought in during 2023 when the whole thing was valued at $50 to $60 million. Good return on a product whose core feature is letting strangers read your opinions. A24 and Sony were both circling. A24 walked once the price kept climbing, so the studio with the most Letterboxd-poisoned fanbase in America got outbid by the crossword people. Buchanan and von Randow are expected to stay on and report to a Times executive, and the Times plans to run its ad technology through Letterboxd's systems. Nothing is signed, and the Times itself says the talks could still fall apart.

Why you should give a shit: If it closes, the paper that reviews the movies also owns the scoreboard where 30 million people grade them, and your four-star rating of a Jason Statham film becomes a line item on a public company's balance sheet.