Things like this don't happen on Letterboxd. It's supposed to be a place where movie nerds share their love of cinema, a throwback to the internet's pre-Facebook halcyon days. But lately, it’s been reeling from a disagreement between the site’s users and staff that got so big, major directors started weighing in. To make matters worse, it wasn’t some argument about Marvel movies or Martin Scorsese. It was about anime.
The trouble started on September 9, when Letterboxd’s curators updated the platform's official list of top-rated movies. Usually, the list changes only when a new movie gets rated highly enough to remove another from the top 250, but Neon Genesis Evangelion: The End of Evangelion had gone from No. 23 overall to off the list entirely. In a comment on the list, curator Dave Vis called the removal “an effort to align our eligibility rules,” made after “careful consideration.”
Letterboxd’s users, by and large, didn’t agree that the effort had been very careful. The comment section of the “official top 100 animation” list, which also removed End of Evangelion, became a pressure chamber of fury, disagreement, and confusion, filled with the kind of negativity and argument the site has made a point of avoiding.
Letterboxd has grown steadily since its 2011 launch, and now boasts more than 15 million users. Until now, it has largely steered clear of growing pains, even as the platform took off during people’s Covid-19-lockdown-induced movie marathons. If anything, it has become a source for memes on other platforms like TikTok and X. But the drawback of creating a community modeled after the 2000s internet is re-creating the same tensions between moderators and users that plagued early social media platforms, which is pretty much what happened when End of Evangelion fell off the top lists.
The change became the subject of thinkpieces, Reddit posts, and talk on platforms far less moderated than Letterboxd itself—never a good sign for such a specific disagreement. On X, people called the decision “crazy,” “racist,” and “a can of worms.” Jane Schoenbrun, director of I Saw the TV Glow, called End of Evangelion “obviously a movie.”
But nothing is obvious when it comes to End of Evangelion. The groundbreaking anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion has inspired everyone from Jordan Peele to Guillermo del Toro, but the show’s ending in 1996 was compromised by scheduling and budget problems, as well as multiple rounds of changes from TV networks. End of Evangelion, released in Japanese theaters a year later, was meant to be an “alternate ending” to the show, one better matching the creators’ original vision than the one that concluded the series.
The result was something even more indelible than the show that led up to it. The Brooklyn Academy of Music called the film “beautiful, compelling, and provocative” when the institution screened it earlier this year. Music, images, and quotes from the film (a label we’ll use here for the sake of argument) have graduated from in-jokes to memes to standardized cultural references—at least, among people who take anime seriously.
That includes the team who made the decision. “The End of Evangelion is both part of a much wider story and a work of art on its own,” says Letterboxd’s editor-in-chief Gemma Gracewood. “In this case, we recognize that our list moderators strive to maintain a Top 250 that enables film lovers to discover a century of largely standalone cinematic excellence, without having necessarily to rely on deep prior knowledge of a TV show.”
This highly-involved definition is typical for Letterboxd, which has dealt with quieter debates on similar topics for years. The platform allows users to review miniseries and TV movies but not regular TV shows (for the moment). In the words of one of its founders, the decision was made to avoid “film-logging being overrun by people binge-watching Friends,” but edge cases will always exist. What happens when a miniseries gets a second season? If a show has feature-length episodes, are they all TV movies?
To quote Megalopolis, the new contentious movie by Letterboxd user Francis Ford Coppola, the debate is what really matters. These are the kinds of highly technical, unabashedly nerdy disagreements that form the bedrock of virtually every internet community. “Film nerds love to rank things,” says film journalist Brandon Streussnig. “We all love making our little lists and when a list doesn't reflect ours, that personal annoyance creeps in even if it's irrational.”
Streussnig also notes there’s another emotional component: the movie itself. “[End of Evangelion is] a film that means more to the people who love it than almost anything. It hits them on an almost existential level. So to be told that it doesn't qualify as a film because of some made-up reason, [and] therefore can’t be classified among the greats, stings.”
All this is why Letterboxd has found so much success in the first place. Fifteen million users may not sound like a very impressive base for a social platform, but it’s enormous for such a niche and specific community. Ever since IMDB shut down its message boards in 2017, Letterboxd has taken its place as the center of gravity for film fans online. Actors now regularly list their top four films on press tours. Luminaries like Rian Johnson and Ayo Edebiri have active, opinionated accounts, and last month John Carpenter had to personally confirm that he was being impersonated on the platform.
As it grows, so does the magnitude of its decisions. Letterboxd has had to reverse course before: After months of deleting any reviews of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return, Letterboxd officially listed it in December 2017, after the Museum of Modern Art and Cahiers du Cinéma both called it one of the year’s best films.
With End of Evangelion, there wasn’t any higher authority—the decision was entirely down to Letterboxd. Gracewood describes it as an all-hands-on-deck moment, convening “members of the list moderating team with our editorial, social, community, and data teams to consider various aspects of the decision.”
Ultimately, after “a smooth and quick process,” End of Evangelion returned to the top lists after less than 48 hours. Letterboxd’s users were happy with the decision, but no one expected the reconciliation to last very long. “We know this won’t be the last time our community will let us know what they think,” Gracewood says. It’s an acknowledgement that this is an inevitable part of the space they’ve cultivated. A social network dedicated to organization and art critique needs to respond to critiques of how they organize things.
Sure enough, on October 7, the anime film Perfect Blue passed The Thing to take the No. 1 spot the platform’s list of top-rated horror movies. At time of writing, hundreds of commenters on X, Reddit, and Letterboxd itself are going back and forth over whether the film qualifies as horror. At least everyone agrees it’s a film this time.
