There’s much to consider when you’re a publicist and a client planning for the push of a new movie.
If a celebrity needs to prove just how down-to-earth or relatable they are, they can consume obscenely fiery chicken wings on “Hot Ones” and nearly lose control of their bodily functions. If they’re looking to be taken more seriously, they can journey into the Criterion Closet and pontificate about the artistic wonders of some of the most acclaimed movies in celluloid history. The more obscure, the better.
Letterboxed’s viral “Four Favorites” gives participants a chance to demonstrate their relatability and cinematic knowledge simultaneously and in a fraction of the time, too. Any film fan who has been online in the last few months will have undoubtedly seen clips of Nicolas Cage, Adam Sander, Jennifer Lawrence, Keanu Reeves, Tom Hanks, Ryan Gosling, Emily Blunt — basically anyone with a new movie to wax about — overwhelmed and struggling to whittle their favorite movies down to just four.
Through Letterboxd’s unique red carpet approach, we discovered Sandler’s love of “Five Easy Pieces” and “The Last Detail,” Lawrence’s equal adulation for both “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and “The Long Goodbye,” as well as Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott delightfully geeking out over “The Remains of the Day.”
In an age when most film coverage can feel the same, and sanitized answers are repeated ad nauseam by media-trained talent bored by their own responses, you can see the delight beam across their faces when they’re asked by Letterboxd to give their four favorites. More than that, the ask produces genuine interactions. We get a candid look into what these people actually do in their spare time and what they’re looking for in a movie.
Letterboxd’s editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood said there’s a clear distinction between asking someone to name their four favorite movies and what they think are the four best films ever made.
“These aren’t the best. These are their favorites. So they must have an inherent passion for them,” Gracewood told IndieWire. “We’re not there to trip them up, because it’s a beautiful question that helps to expand their minds. You can see that it gets their cogs turning. There’s a pained enjoyment to them working it out.”
It also helps that talent can only pick four movies, and on the spot. “Sometimes, people don’t understand that it’s in reference to the Letterboxd app, and you can see them wondering why it’s not a top five or 10,” said Letterboxd’s head of social Aaron Yap. “It being four means that they have to really think and cut something out or make sure that they have something in. It ends up revealing more about them.”
Why the keen fascination with the favorite movies of people in the industry?
“There’s an innate desire to want to be like our heroes,” said Justin LaLiberty, a Letterboxd user since 2012 who has logged over 12,620 movies. “There’s an immense gratification that comes from Christopher Nolan saying he loves a movie and you love that movie, too. People think, ‘I’m just like Christopher Nolan.’ Especially if a director mentions a deep cut or something under the radar that someone has already seen and liked.”
Letterboxd’s “Four Favorites” launched after Yap worked on a clip of “The French Dispatch” cast trying to name all of Wes Anderson’s films. “It was just a list of movies. But I saw it and I thought, ‘Well this kind of looks like a Letterboxd thing.’ But instead of using a normal list, we can use the poster art that we have on Letterboxd. It just snowballed from there,” Yap said.
By that point, Letterboxd had established itself as the go-to place where films fans could discuss their favorites with other cinephiles, write reviews, and log what they’d been watching. Founded in 2011 by Matthew Buchanan and Karl von Randow, Letterboxd over the next nine years developed a loyal fanbase of around 1.8 million users. During the pandemic, though, its popularity surged. As of June 2024, Letterboxd now has more than 15 million members, with the majority in the U.S.
Each Letterboxd user has a profile page that shows how many films they’ve watched during their time on the site, how many they’ve seen that year, who they follow, who follows them, a biography, and links to their other social media pages. But the centerpiece of each profile is their four favorite films.
“The community looks at the four favorites as a way of expressing yourself on your profile. It’s a very personal place for you to share your taste and film,” said Yap, who believes one key to Letterboxd’s success has been its presentation of movie posters. “The poster is very key to the Letterboxd app. We always wanted to bridge the digital world and the human side of talking about movies.”
The oldest “Four Favorites” videos on Letterboxd’s YouTube page feature Jack Lowden, Bowen Yang, Scott Speedman, Auli’i Cravalho, and Jenny Slate, each earning a few thousand views. But then, just a few weeks later, Michelle Yeoh and Jamie Lee Curtis’ favorites shared around “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan’s for “Fresh” got 26,000 and 29,000 views, respectively. Aubrey Plaza’s for “Emily the Criminal” reached 46,000. Clearly, they were onto something.
“It was a long time of trial and error. We’d discuss it with the publicity teams, try to make them buy into the concept, and allow us to actually ask this question,” said Gracewood. “We felt like it was part of who we are. It’s part of the ecosystem of the website and it’s a continuation of that.”
Gracewood can remember the exact moment she realized “Four Favorites” had really caught on. It was on the red carpet for “Origin” at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023. The plan had been to ask its Oscar-nominated writer and director Ava DuVernay, who previously worked as a publicist herself, to name films by female directors that explored big concepts.
“She told me, ‘No, you’re Letterboxd. I just want to do my four favorites. I’ve got them ready.’ That was amazing to me. I was trying to make sure we were considerate of this incredibly beautiful and important movie. But she was like, ‘No, I just want to do my four favorites.”
From that point on, as the awards season built up to the 2024 Academy Awards, the segment’s popularity only increased. Viewing figures got into the hundreds of thousands. Sometimes even the millions. “Cillian Murphy for ‘Oppenheimer’ and the ‘Poor Things’ red carpet were the most popular videos for ‘Favorites’ that we’ve done,” says Yap.
Each of Willem Dafoe’s picks — “Onibaba,” “The Magician,” “Barry Lyndon,” and, ahem, “Poor Things” itself — saw a bump in popularity on Letterboxd. “We call it the Willem Dafoe bump now because we can see people adding films to their watchlists after people have mentioned them,” says Gracewood. “That’s really the most positive impact of ‘Four Favorites.’ It gets people to discover new films. That’s such a win.”
At the same time, there’s backlash if someone lists films deemed too unfamiliar by fans, as if they’re trying too hard. Some people were particularly displeased that Emma Stone called Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 romantic comedy “City Lights” and Miloš Forman’s Czech new-wave satire “The Firemen’s Ball” her favorite films.
“There is a subset of discourse that thinks if someone is picking a film they haven’t heard of that they’re doing it just to sound smart. They think it’s pretentious,” said Yap. “When in reality, it’s just that they haven’t heard of the film.”
Predictably, the internet is already awash with endless theories and methods about what should go into such a list. “There are whole Reddit threads that ask how do you choose your four favorites,” said Gracewood. “People discuss what it says about them. Others think it’s about encouraging people to watch other movies. There are so many different theories that go into people choosing their favorites.”
But with Letterboxd’s popularity growing, and with red-carpet celebrities more aware than ever that they’re going to be asked to name their favorite films, is there a worry that people might soon start to overthink their “Four Favorites,” thereby making it somehow less genuine?
“As long as it comes for the heart and they’re talking about a film in a passionate way that people can connect with, that’s really the main thing,” said Yap. For him, in the end, it all goes back to why Letterboxd was started in the first place. “We just want people to connect and share their love of movies.”
