Every day thousands upon thousands of people log movies on Letterboxd, the social-media app dedicated to movie watching and reviewing. The app and its accompanying desktop website allow users to also browse through its mammoth database of more than a million films, which is arranged by default according to “popularity.”
But popularity doesn’t simply mean the most-watched title on the site. Instead, according to Letterboxd’s social media team, a film’s popularity is determined by “a mix of member activity, including reviews, comments, watches, logs, watchlists, etc.”
While Letterboxd has never revealed the precise formula used to calculate the numerical value they assign to a movie’s popularity, from that description it’s clear that “popularity” is really a measure of engagement; not just how much people like a movie (a simple star rating tells you that), but also how much people log it, review it, comment on it, add it to lists, and so on.
And right now, these are the most popular titles in the history of Letterboxd.
The Most Popular Movies on Letterboxd All-Time
Based on the site’s internal “popularity” metric (“a mix of member activity, including reviews, comments, watches, logs, watchlists”), these are Letterboxd’s most popular titles.
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What can we learn from this list? Well, it helps to be a recent Oscar winner — like Parasite, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Oppenheimer — or to be a popular (but in some ways divisive) title that stokes intense reactions, like Fight Club or Whiplash or La La Land, all of which have huge devoted fanbases, and some vocal naysayers. And when all else fails, just make a movie about Barbie. That tends to do extremely well too.
The Most Polarizing Movies Ever, According to Letterboxd
These are the movies with the widest variance in their star ratings from zero to five on the movie website Letterboxd.