These days, every serious film watcher is on Letterboxd, the movie review app that now means many things to many people. Paul Mescal loves it. Ayo Edebiri actually uses it. Martin Scorsese hangs out on it. A film-based social platform, Letterboxd is the kind of place where cinephilia is taken to the extreme, with a single-minded devotion that’s both inspiring and terrifying. Here, film nerds log, rate and review every movie they’ve watched, and more often than not, prepare a treasure trove of incredibly specific lists, like ‘Movies In Which It Takes 2 SRKs To Defeat 1 Arjun Rampal’ (Om Shanti Om, and Ra.One, in case you’re wondering).
Every year, like Spotify Wrapped, Letterboxd too sends out individual ‘wrapped’ emails detailing a user’s viewing habits, and every year, I’m astounded by the number of people who brag-post about having logged 1,000 plus films annually. I’m a film critic, and I watch movies for a living. But even I’m surprised (My 2024 tally was a paltry 209 by comparison).
If they watch 1,000 movies in 365 days, that’s an average of three movies a day. So who are these people? What do they do? Do they cheat-watch films at 1.5x or 2x speed? And most importantly, how do they manage to watch all these films? Gayle Sequeira tracks down four Letterboxd patrons and ask them for their strategy to cross the 1,000 milestone.
