Keeping track of where movies were streaming was driving me crazy until I found this app

Summary

Letterboxd is a movie app for tracking watched films, erasing the need for streaming service watch lists.
Subscription notifies when a movie from your watch list is on a streaming service you have.
Despite its limitations, it’s perfect for movie lovers and provides unique insights and recommendations.

Streaming services are just about impossible to avoid now if you want to keep up with the latest movie and TV show releases. If you’re anything like me, you have a hard time staying up to date on everything, and there are good films that inevitably slip through the cracks. Adding things to your watch list on Hulu, Netflix, Max, Tubi, etc. are good solutions to that, but I frequently run into another problem when I do that. When I’m finally ready to dive into something, I find that it’s been removed from Netflix and moved to another platform. Instead of researching to find out where it went, I’ve been relying on another app.

Letterboxd is primarily known as an app where you can rate movies you have watched and post your four favorites for the world to see. Aside from that, you can use the watch list feature that keeps track of where movies are at any given time. I’ve just about stopped using streaming service watch lists for third-party content because I know it’s not going to stick around there for long, so there’s no point doing it.

Letterboxd

Letterboxd is a movie app that lets you keep track of everything you watch and own.

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Letterboxd has been a life saver

Lots to like with this app

Letterboxd

I don’t know what my breaking point was, but I know it just became really annoying to finally sit down to watch something only to have to track it down. I don’t like wasting time trying to find something to watch, and there have been too many nights where I simply ran out of time to do anything after spending too long searching. Letterboxd has let me cut back significantly on that time, and whenever I want to watch something, I just open up the app and go to my watch list.

It never takes long to find something, and something cool about Letterboxd is that I get to read some reviews about the movie before I watch it. Nobody likes wasting hours of their life watching something sub-par, so it’s nice to have an app that lets me cut out all the unnecessary time and let me start watching something. There’s also the underrated bonus of being able to sort your watch list by genre. As of the time of this writing, my list has more than 100 films on it, so if I want to narrow it down to just comedies, that’s something I can do if I’m in the mood for it. Netflix, for example, doesn’t let me sort like that.

For what feels like years now, Letterboxd has said it was going to add TV show support, but it still doesn’t have a wide selection of options. As a result, it’s still not great for anybody looking to add TV shows to their watch list outside of miniseries, so don’t expect Letterboxd to shoulder the load in that area just yet.

While I think Letterboxd is perfect for watch lists, it doesn’t solve my greater problem, and it’s that shows and movies bounce around too much. I don’t subscribe to every service, so it doesn’t really help if something left Netflix and went to Paramount+ because I don’t subscribe to both of them. It’s nice to know where something is, but it doesn’t stop me from having to pay for a service. Although Letterboxd doesn’t solve all of my issues, I’ve just about stopped using actual streaming service watch lists after I got my account properly set up. With it being a free app, I don’t see much of a downside to using it. Unrelated, but I spend so much time on Letterboxd that I ponied up the $49 annual fee to become a Patron. It lets me get more features, like the ability to change movie posters to whatever I want and support an app I like, so it’s a win-win for me.

You actually need to pay for at least the Pro subscription to receive notifications when something comes to a streaming service you have, however. This costs $19 a year, and if you go through the necessary steps to name all the streaming services you have access to, you’ll receive emails when something from your watch list hits one of those services. It also tells you if a movie you clicked on is streaming on a service if you click on it, so it makes finding things to watch a breeze.

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Letterboxd does a lot of things

Movie lovers should definitely have the app installed

Netflix home page featuring a banner and carousels

If you’re a fan of movies in any way, I don’t see how you could go wrong installing this app. It’s available on both Android and iOS, and you can even install it on your Apple TV if you want. It’s the first thing I open up after watching a movie just so I can jot down my thoughts on it. By reviewing a movie, it helps me keep track of everything I’ve watched, and I also get some good recommendations for what to watch next after seeing something I liked.

It wasn’t until I splurged for a paid subscription that I started taking advantage of everything the platform has to offer. I have spent hours and hours creating lists for nobody other than myself, and it’s the platform I use to keep track of my ever-growing physical media library. I’m not sure if it officially counts as a social media app, but if it does, then it’s by far the one I use the most. The end of the year is the most exciting time to be a Letterboxd user as you get your year-in-review, similar to Spotify, where it tells you your most watched actor, genre, etc. You get access to these stats at any time if you’re a paid user, so there’s another incentive there.

While many of the reviews left are one-liners, there’s a surprising amount of depth to some of them. If you want to get some unique takes on movies, it’s a good app to dive into. If you build up a following list of enough people whose reviews you respect, you might be able to find a lot of movies that you would’ve otherwise missed. Eventually, the same can be said for TV shows once they are added to the service.