Matinee & Letterboxd

Matinee is an independent, hand-built project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Letterboxd in any way. “Letterboxd” appears on this site only to describe what Matinee works with — your Letterboxd account's public activity — the same way a phone case might say which phone it fits.

If Letterboxd ever ships an official API or program for this kind of thing, we'd be first in line.

Each Matinee frame belongs to one household, and it only follows the Letterboxd accounts that household has added — a friend circle, not a crawl. Everything it reads is already public: public RSS feeds and public profile pages, the same things you'd see visiting letterboxd.com without logging in.

Requests are made gently, at frame-refresh pace — a handful of feed checks per household, spaced out, with caching so nothing is fetched twice when once will do. No scraping farms, no firehose, no reselling. The data goes one place: that household's wall.

If a friend added you to their frame and you'd rather not be on anyone's kitchen wall, you can opt out here — it takes ten seconds, applies to every Matinee display at once, and blocks anyone from adding you again.

Deletions are mirrored, too: if you delete a review on Letterboxd, it disappears from any wall showing it. Your edit button keeps working here.

A wall object should outlive a web service. If Matinee ever shuts down, the display client goes open source so the hardware keeps working — your frame will not be bricked by a project winding down.

This page is the whole policy — there's no longer version in smaller print. If something here seems off, or you want your data handled differently, write to sam@sam-bloch.com and a human (the human, really) will answer.