Letterboxd is, at the end of the day, my favorite app. It’s all about movies. You get to see what your friends think about them, and you get to have a fun little review logged. What’s not to love? And I get to publicly show people just how much nonsense I choose to watch. It’s great! And if you pay for the Patron or Pro levels of the app, you get a yearly roundup of your stats to tell you what you watched and who is in your top directors and actors at the year’s end, based on the movies that you entered into your viewing log that year.
My friends are smarter than I am. I’m speaking specifically in the sense that my friends have made sure their Letterboxd stats reflect what they wanted them to by the end of 2022, while I looked and realized that Matt Damon is my number 3 actor because I watched all of the Jason Bourne movies. It’s okay though, my top two are currently tied between Nicolas Cage and Chris Evans, and that feels telling.
But what my friends and their beautifully curated stats have taught me is that I need to focus more on my year-long plan—mainly because I don’t want another year where I’m not paying attention and somehow an actor I don’t necessarily love is in my top (sorry, Matt Damon, but you’re not exactly my first choice … ever).
And so, one of my goals in 2023 is to actually pay attention to what I want in my year-end Letterboxd stats. But it isn’t exactly an easy thing to manage. So here are the categories that matter and how you can go about making your Letterboxd stats something to be proud of.
Pick your choice of actors
For me, the top two actors on my stats this year are two actors that I do love and appreciate, so them both having 14 movies included in my stats isn’t that surprising. Chris Evans had a big year, so it isn’t that shocking that he’s up there, and with the release of The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, I rewatched a lot of older Nicolas Cage movies, so neither is an upsetting development.
But there is some method to the madness that you can implement if you want a specific actor to be at the top of your list. As a fan of filmography watches, you could simply pick who you want in the top by watching all their work. Point is, you can easily manage the actors in your top. It gets tricky when you watch whole franchises, because then you’re getting a series of actors in your stats you might not want. Like, Lord of the Rings will bring Ian McKellen to your top but will also bring a series of others over who you might not have wanted at McKellen’s side.
So be careful about how you go ahead and navigate it, but you have a lot of control in this area.
Think about your directors
Again, this can be tricky because if you’re more focused on actors, then you might have random directors in your top you don’t want. For me, I think I’ll aim to have both Steven Spielberg and Rian Johnson in the mix of my directors in 2023 just because I want to. It’s also nice to know you want to watch more female directors or directors of color and make your choices that way.
Point is, you can craft your director stats just like that of your actors. The problem might be that one might mess up the other depending on what exactly you’re watching so tread lightly.
Maybe don’t give everything the same star rating
My rule on Letterboxd is that I give everything five stars unless I have been offended by the movie, because I have to actually rate movies for work. So my “highest rated” section on my stats is … well, a mess because everything has the same rating.
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What are your stats in 2022? How do you want them to change in 2023?
(featured image: screengrab from Letterboxd)
