A entity called Intrinsic Entertainment Collaborative, ink barely dry on its certificate of incorporation, is making an ambitious run for Letterboxd, whose private equity owner is exploring a sale of the popular platform for indie film lovers.
Social entrepreneur Elizabeth Joyce created Intrinsic as the home of Community Center, a new collaborative marketing engine for independent filmmakers launching this fall. With Letterboxd in play, she pivoted to a crowdfunding campaign to cover the cost of preparing an offer. She joined producer Ted Hope and others on Substack and social media to make the case for keeping the consequential platform for discussion and grassroots marketing of indie cinema from passing to another private equity firm or a big corporate owner.
“Letterboxd is for sale! Oh no! Oh yes! It could mean the tragic end of a glorious beginning or the start of something even greater. And in many ways, which outcome it may be, is up to us… if we act quickly,” Hope wrote on his Substack in a joint post with Joyce.
“Never before have we had such a community of cinema lovers as we now have in Letterboxd. An aggregated community of the world’s true film lovers is an incredible grail. The Letterboxd founders have done a remarkable job making sure Letterboxd has always been about the community, but that now could be lost,” said Hope, a former co-head of movies at Amazon Studios and an advisor to Intrinsic. “What would happen if the TechBrosCos swept another gem into their walled garden … If we don’t act now, that possibility is a likely outcome.”
Semafor first reported in late April that Canadian investment firm Tiny Ltd, which acquired 60% of Letterboxed in 2023, is looking to sell its stake.
Joyce acknowledged that Intrinsic’s move is hugely ambitious, that “any number of private equity firms can come to the table with any amount of money they decide.” Ditto for strategic buyers.
Comcast spinoff Versant is eyeing Letterboxd. Tiny has hired investment bank Liontree to assess the market ahead of a formal sale process.
“I know it’s an audacious goal to try to have a mission-driven acquisition of a profitable private company from private equity. That’s an ambitious thing to attempt. What gives me confidence is the work that we’ve done over the past year, the partnerships that we’ve developed, which put us in a position to really try it,” she tells Deadline. “If it does not succeed, the importance of the conversation remains the same, which is that we need new business models, in the film industry and society in general.”
Some have noted that Tiny itself is a PE firm and its ownership has not been particularly problematic. The point Hope and Joyce are making is that Tiny’s exit could be.
Letterboxd said in a statement that any decision about its future would involve founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, CEO and CTO, who each own 20% of the company.
Will The Community Buy In?
Intrinsic’s 60-day campaign on independent film and television crowdfunder Seed & Spark had raised about $27k as of Friday night. The goal is $100k to cover attorneys’ fees for drawing up investor documents and disclosures laying the groundwork for an offer. If Intrinsic does bid, equity financing would come from mission-driven institutional investors, a group Joyce has been working with to back Community Center.
Crowdfunding “was the fastest path for us is to raise the money that will allow us to move forward,” she says. “And it’s also sort of proof of concept. Will a community that loves Letterboxd rally around it and want to take ownership of it?”
Intrinsic is a public benefit corporation. These are similar to traditional for-profit companies in most ways except that they make social commitments a part of their business plan.
For Joyce, one thing that means is an exit strategy that does not involve private equity or an IPO. But even mission-aligned investors want an off-ramp.
She lays out the ideal scenario: “I need startup capital for a business so I get a group of people who can write me bigger checks. It’s unproven. They don’t know if it’s going to work. They’re just willing to help contribute startup capital. And then, as the business starts to gain popularity, I have people, regulars. And once I have enough people gathered who love the business, love the product, love what I’m doing, and want to participate in ownership and evolve it into a cooperative ownership model, then I can use Wefunder [also a public benefit corporation] to do an equity crowdfunding campaign, and we raise money that way. We can use that money to gradually buy back shares from the early investors. It’s not a public offering in the IPO sense, it’s an offering to the community to buy in.”
Joyce, who lives in Boston, majored in human rights policy at NYU and worked for Human Rights Watch. She studied economic sociology in grad school, exploring alternative business models and worked at nonprofits and in academia. Stepping back after a health scare in 2012 she founded a company called Yoga By Numbers, a mat with target numbers and gridlines and accompanying app with instructional videos, shut it during Covid and started writing screenplays, an early interest, and studying the independent film industry. She’s working with producer Susan Stover to develop her third script, a dramedy about an Irish American family in Boston dealing with the father’s end of life.
Noting as have many that it’s easier and cheaper to make a film now but harder and more costly to draw an audience, she began work on a marketing model that would generate enthusiasm for early-stage film projects among a particular community, building a base of supporters who can be helpful raising money later. She honed Community Center at Harvard Law School’s Transactional Law Clinic and the Community Enterprise Clinic at Boston College and filed Intrinsic’s article of incorporation last month.
Letterboxd Founders Would Be Involved In Sale
Buchanan and von Randow, tech entrepreneurs and cinephiles based in Auckland, New Zealand, launched Letterboxd as a passion project in 2011 for film fans and industry players to create, track and share reviews, comments and all manner of wacky lists around movies. Engagement surged during the pande ic and it now has nearly 30 million users, who skew young and can drive awareness and word of mouth around a release. Its first marketing partnership was in early 2000 with Neon on the black-and-white theatrical release of Cannes-winning hit Parasite and many others have followed. Indie producers and distributors say its influence cannot be overstated.
New features like Video Store include a limited time only (30 days) shelf of films called Unreleased Gems that have shown at festivals or one-off screenings but haven’t yet gone to wider distribution. When a film joins Letterboxd Video Store, the company says, it sees an average 8x increase in platform engagement — watchlists, ratings, reviews, likes and diary logs. For Unreleased Gems, that jumps to 40x. Horror film It Ends was picked up by Neon eight days into its second Unreleased Gems shelf and released last year.
Buchanan and von Randow also run Cactuslab, a web and app design and development studio they started in 2001. Intrinsic is one of its clients. Joyce tapped the firm last fall to design the Community Center platform.
Tiny’s 2023 acquisition valued Letterboxd — which had just surpassed 10 million users at the time — at about $50 million. It has three times as many users and would be worth considerably more than that now. Asked about a potential sale, the company declined to comment, saying, “There’s nothing specific for us to share at this time.”
“As Letterboxd has grown, it’s natural there will be interest in what we do next.”
Letterboxd founders Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow
Letterboxd