Letterboxd is now doing video rentals—and it goes hard on indie films. Here’s what to expect

Letterboxd, the movie tracking app and social media platform for cinephiles, first announced its new online film rental platform earlier this year at Cannes Film Festival. Now, more details about the launch date and titles have been revealed.

The Video Store will officially launch on Wednesday, December 10, and will feature nine films across two curated shelves, which includes titles from nine countries. 

Here’s some of what film fans can expect: Think a Todd Haynes deep cut, to a restored version of a Filipino classic, and more, including Chile and Indonesia’s submissions for the upcoming 98th Academy Awards, a hit from the 2025 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, and an Indian neo-noir thriller that was previously unavailable since its 2023 Cannes debut.

The platform will operate on a transactional video-on-demand (TVOD) model with no subscription requirement, and the “shelves” will be programmed by the Letterboxd team using millions of watchlists, reviews, and behavioral signals. Each title was chosen based on member demand, while also leaving room for discoveries the community has yet to find.

The Video Store will be available in 23 countries, including the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Spain, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Austria, Italy, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Belgium, Switzerland, Greece, and Cyprus.

Pricing and availability vary by film and country, and will be shown directly within the Video Store at launch. Viewers will be able to watch on their TV via Apple TV 4K, Chromecast, and AirPlay, and through web, iOS, and Android.

“We’re incredibly proud of what we and our community have built,” Letterboxd CEO and cofounder Matthew Buchanan said in a statement. “We take their lead, and believe that has been integral to Letterboxd’s success. They tell us what’s really happening—a 1980s action film suddenly trending, a festival title from two years ago still being added to watchlists.”

A focus on film discovery

While Letterboxd plans on rolling out more titles in weeks and months to come, the first two shelves made available at launch will reflect the platform’s core mission of film discovery.

The first shelf, “Unreleased Gems,” features exclusive films from festivals that haven’t had releases yet in specific countries, and will only be available in the Video Store for a limited time.

Those titles include Alexander Ullom’s 2025 directional debut It Ends, which made waves at this year’s SXSW, about recent graduates trapped on an infinite nightmarish background; Yandy Laurens’ 2025 sci-fi romance A Wife From The Future, about a woman who travels back in time to change her husband’s destiny, which has been selected as Indonesia’s submission for the Best International Feature Film for the upcoming Oscars; Anurag Kashyap’s 2023 neo-noir thriller Kennedy, which premiered at Cannes Film Festival in 2023; and director Diego Céspedes’ 2025 feature film debut The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo, about a young girl protecting her town’s queer community from superstitious panic, which won the Un Certain Regard Prize at the 2025 Cannes Film Festival.

Meanwhile, the second shelf, “Lost & Found,” features a slate of underdog films. Availability of films varies by country, with many titles exclusive to Letterboxd where they are shown.

Those titles include Lau Kar-Leung’s 1988 action-comedy film Tiger on the Beat starring Chow Yun-Fat; Mike de Leon’s 1981 Filipino classic Kisapmata about a young woman living under her domineering father’s suffocating control; Elia Suleiman’s It Must Be Heaven, which won the Special Mention from the Main Competition Jury and FIPRESCI Prize at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival (but was delayed theatrically because of the COVID-19 pandemic); Todd Haynes’ 1991 Sundance Film Festival hit Poison; and Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s alien invasion film Before We Vanish, based on a cult Japanese stage play, which previously screened at the 2017 Cannes Film Festival.

“Video Store lets us act on [real] demand, whether it’s helping a distributor unlock value from a forgotten gem in its vault or giving a filmmaker direct access to the audience they’ve been building on our platform,” Letterboxd CEO Buchanan said. “It’s our way of saying to the industry: let’s harness this interest to get films to the people who want them most.” 

The launch of Letterboxd Video Store comes during a time when the platform has seen significant growth and found more of a mainstream audience over the past four years. In mid-2020, Letterboxd had 1.8 million members. Now, it currently has over 17 million, with around six million joining within the last year. 

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