We just announced an exciting new partnership with Letterboxd, which uses Nanocrowd technology to enhance its movie recommendations. For years, we’ve recommended Letterboxd because their viewer reviews are expansive, heartfelt, and detailed.
Letterboxd is a great social movie site with more than 5 million members who are passionate about sharing their love of movies. Soon after new movies are released, members start writing and rating, expressing their excitement or disappointment. For example, less than a week after the release of the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there were more than 26,000 reviews and 60,000 ratings from Letterboxd members.
We use text reviews from Letterboxd and other sites as data for our ViewerVoice™ Platform, a suite of audience analytics. Recently, we launched the Nanocrowd App that helps users create their own genres and find movies and TV series they love to watch.
Why Letterboxd Chose Nanocrowd
We looked at several possibilities for providing a ‘similar films’ engine, and Nanocrowd’s approach and results were the first to meet our bar. Their approach goes well beyond that of typical genre classifications such as ‘comedy’ and ‘drama’ – which have always been lacking when it comes to representing more complex tastes – and uses sophisticated technology to turn emotive language into concrete data.
Similar Films
Letterboxd can now recommend movies to its members by showing collections of similar films.
When you find a film on Letterboxd, you’ll also see a list of recommended films to watch. Here's an example for the movie Looper. Under "SIMILAR FILMS," you can choose from the recommendations that are similar to Looper.
Clicking ALL gives you the full list. It’s dynamically built by a Nanocrowd algorithm that compares the viewer reviews for each movie. You get 72 recommendations to help you find a movie you’ll love as much as Looper.
Themes
Here you'll find the major themes for the film. As a Looper fan, you know it’s a sci-fi movie, but it also has more themes, including "Crime, drugs, and gangsters" and "High speed and special ops." You can see why these specific themes make it easier for you to find exactly what you’re in the mood to watch.
Nanogenre® Lists
Here’s where our partnership really delivers a radically different experience for Letterboxd members. Nanogenre lists are small collections of films that have specific themes, so you can find another movie that captures the essence of what you enjoyed in Looper.
Take a look at the NANOGENRES collection for Looper.
Maybe you liked Looper because it’s in the "Suspense, Slick, Stylish" nanogenre collection. You can check out similar films and find something you’ll love to watch.
If that doesn’t match what you’re in the mood to watch, how about "Twist, Mysterious, Confusing" or "Suspense, Guns, Action-Packed." Whatever you love about Looper, you'll find similar films here.
These lists are created with Nanocrowd's ViewerVoice™ platform, which analyzes viewer reactions to a movie or series. The passion that viewers put into their reviews is the emotion-packed data the platform uses to cluster movies and series into Nanogenre® collections – each one capturing a specific reaction. Nanogenre collections are then clustered into broader themes and genres.
The Power of Letterboxd and Nanocrowd Together
The lists of recommended movies become even more powerful with the additional film and member data from Letterboxd. You can filter these lists by attributes, including decade or rating, allowing you to find the best recent movies on the list. You can also save your list of streaming services, so the lists only show the things you can watch right away.
Most important, as a member, you can fade out the thumbnails of movies you've already watched – making the list instantly personal and more powerful. So when you review any of the recommendations, you'll see some personal favorites, and you can easily focus on the movies you haven't seen.
Try it Out
It's easy to see all of it in action – just go to Letterboxd and search for a movie you love. Then have fun finding something great to watch!
For another take on recommendations by Nanocrowd, try the Nanocrowd app. Then click on Feedback in the menu and tell us what you think.