A24 and The New York Times Emerge as Bidders for Letterboxd in Sale Valued Above $300 Million

A24 and The New York Times Company have advanced to a second round of bidding for Letterboxd, the film-focused social network, in a sale process that people involved in the talks say could value the company at more than $300 million. The two are competing against a longer list of media and technology suitors that has formed over the past five months around a ten-person company built to let movie fans log, rate and argue about what they watch.

The sale is being run out of Auckland, New Zealand, where Letterboxd was founded in 2011, but the decision now sits with owners on two continents. Tiny, the Canadian holding company that bought a 60 percent stake in 2023, hired the investment bank LionTree earlier this year to solicit offers, and interest has been broader and more persistent than the company's small footprint would suggest.

The Numbers

Letterboxd counted more than 29 million people logging and reviewing films as of the first quarter of this year, according to Tiny's own account of the acquisition, up from roughly 10 million when Tiny bought in. Members logged nearly 900 million films and cast more than 670 million ratings in 2025 alone, both up by roughly a third from the year before, according to the company's year-end accounting of activity on the platform. Any deal near $300 million would value Letterboxd at roughly 20 times its projected 2026 earnings of about $15 million, a multiple bankers marketing the deal have attributed to the platform's near-total lack of paid marketing spend. Tiny's initial purchase four years ago valued the whole company at $50 million to $60 million.

From Side Project to Sale Process

Letterboxd was built by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, two New Zealand developers who had worked together for years before writing the app in their spare time as a way to keep track of the films they watched. It grew slowly through word of mouth among cinephiles for most of the 2010s before an explosion in members during pandemic-era lockdowns, when a captive audience turned to streaming and, in large numbers, to logging what they streamed. The habit stuck: what began as a niche diary app for film obsessives has become a reference point for studios gauging pre-release buzz and for critics tracking how a film's reputation shifts in the weeks after release, well beyond the opening-weekend box office numbers that used to be the industry's main gauge of success. When Tiny took its majority stake in 2023, the founders described the deal in explicitly protective terms. In a post announcing the transaction, Buchanan wrote that the arrangement was meant to secure "the platform's future as an independently run company," adding that "aside from the ownership change ... very little else will change," with the founders continuing to lead the same team from Auckland. Buchanan and von Randow each still hold roughly a fifth of the company and, under the terms of that earlier deal, retain a say in choosing any future owner.

Tiny's willingness to sell surfaced publicly this spring, when reporting first described early conversations with the trade newsletter The Ankler that did not lead to a deal. Since then the list of parties said to have explored a purchase has grown to include Netflix, Sony Pictures, Paramount Skydance, the private equity firms TPG and RedBird, and Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, whose firm Seven Seven Six had reportedly looked at a bid, according to a report on the widening bidder pool. A24 and The New York Times are now described as the furthest along, having each submitted offers in a second round of the process, according to a report on the state of negotiations.

Who Has a Stake in the Outcome

The most immediate interested party is Letterboxd's own membership, a mostly 18-to-34-year-old audience that has turned five-word capsule reviews and end-of-year "wrapped"-style data dumps into a genuine cultural export, cited increasingly by studios measuring word of mouth alongside traditional reviews. A change of ownership also matters to distributors: A24 in particular has used the platform's lists and discussion threads as informal marketing channels for its releases, and a buyer with a direct stake in outcomes would gain a window into audience sentiment that no other single dataset currently offers. The New York Times, which already publishes film criticism and a Games division built on similar habit-forming, list-making behavior, would be adding a large, engaged audience skewing younger than its core subscriber base.

"It's a phenomenon," Alex Michael, a senior managing director at LionTree, said of Letterboxd's growth, noting the platform draws roughly 30 million monthly visits without spending on paid marketing.

Both prospective buyers have kept public comment minimal. A representative for A24 said only that the studio does not comment on acquisition speculation, according to reporting on the negotiations, which also noted that any final decision on Letterboxd's ownership runs through its founders rather than through Tiny alone. Letterboxd itself has offered a similarly narrow statement, telling reporters there was "nothing specific for us to share at this time."

What Happens Next

People close to the process expect a winner to emerge from the current round within weeks rather than months, though sale timelines in media have slipped before, and none of the parties named has confirmed a bid publicly. A losing bidder from the earlier rounds, including Netflix, Sony or Paramount, could still resurface if talks with the current front-runners stall, a pattern the process has already shown once since Tiny began quietly testing the market last year.

Whichever company prevails will inherit a platform whose value rests almost entirely on a sense of independence from the studios and streamers it covers. Members have voiced unease in the past whenever the platform's ownership has changed hands, worried that a new parent company might push advertising, algorithmic recommendations or paywalled features onto a product whose appeal lies in its plain, list-making simplicity. How a new owner, whether a film financier or a newspaper company, manages that tension is likely to shape the next round of scrutiny once a deal is actually announced.