Inside Letterboxd’s Unlikely Distribution Pipeline: How ‘It Ends’ and Other Gems Found Their Way to a Deal

The film festival system used to be the most direct route to distribution for a film like Alexander Ullom’s “It Ends.” In recent years, however, it’s seemed like that road had simply closed.

Sundance hosted 90-plus films and episodic series this year. A dozen came in with distribution already lined up. The other 80 or so had to find buyers on the ground, and most of them didn’t move until spring, some as late as April and May. Some deals are still happening, even now. That pace followed a 2025 Sundance market so quiet that virtually nothing sold during the festival itself, turning the very health of the market into a major question. Traditional buyers pulled back further, leaving space for newer, finance-backed distributors like Row K and Black Bear to move aggressively into the gap.

Now there’s another distribution option worth taking seriously, and it runs through the movie-logging app Letterboxd.

Faced with buyers who are “incentivized to wait,” as filmmaker Chris Merola told IndieWire, filmmakers are finding an alternative route to audiences through Letterboxd’s Unreleased Gems shelf. It’s a corner of the company’s Video Store built to give festival films a second life while they wait for distributors to make a move.

Less than a year since the Video Store launched, about half of Unreleased Gems titles have gone on to wider distribution, according to Letterboxd’s Head of Content Courtney Mayhew. That’s a track record that makes the shelf worth watching, even if it doesn’t guarantee every film on the platform lands a deal.

Merola’s own film, “Lemonade Blessing,” took the traditional route first: a premiere at the Tribeca Festival, hiring a sales agent, and a run on the festival circuit. None of it produced a deal he wanted. “Festivals are not what they were in the mid-’90s and 2000s,” he said. “The post-COVID landscape accelerated viewing patterns and purchasing patterns into the digital sphere. Festivals have not been able to fully recover.”

As a first-time filmmaker, he learned the hard way what that meant financially, too, paying out of pocket for a publicist and spending roughly $1,500 on tickets just to get his own cast and crew into his premiere screening.

The festival circuit had already cost Merola time and money by the time Letterboxd announced the Video Store late last year. He saw it as a real shot at a deal, not just somewhere to park the film. “As far as leverage and getting a pound-for-pound result, you can’t really beat the Video Store,” he said. “Letterboxd is posting about the film. They have three million followers. Your Instagram accounts will blow up.”

Merola had made peace with self-distribution well before any of this played out. “If we don’t end up with a distributor, I’ll just self-distribute,” he said. “I know that it’ll find an audience.” He never had to use it.

But getting there took a personal connection. “I made a friend through a friend, Lindsay Blair Goeldner, who does some of the social media for Letterboxd in New York,” Merola said. “She watched ‘Lemonade Blessing’ and liked it. I asked if she could send an intro email to Letterboxd, and she did. Two months later, Letterboxd said, hey, we’d love a screener. They got back to me very quickly. That’s how Video Store happened.”

Once Letterboxd brass looked at the film, what earned it a spot came down to something less quantifiable than any of the platform’s own metrics. “Programming is also about having a mix of titles,” Mayhew said. “You want to make sure for each shelf you’re not having the same types of films, and you’re hopefully serving different audiences. ‘Lemonade Blessing’ stood out because it felt really authentic. It was from a young director, very much in his voice, very specific to his experience, and even if his experience is not yours, that authenticity shines through in the work.”

The filmmaker was blunt about why distributors are taking their time to make deals at film festivals. “Every deal they pass on costs them nothing. Every deal they say yes to, they own if it flops. So the smart move for them is to sit still and let their existing library keep bringing in money while they wait for something they can’t lose on,” he said. “Once in a while there’s a bit of FOMO and one title gets a lot of buzz and gets snapped up.”

What ultimately sold him on the Video Store wasn’t just exposure. “If I take a normal distributor, they’re going to charge me print and advertising as a debt,” he said. “But if I went with Letterboxd, it’s revenue sharing. They didn’t charge me anything.”

“Lemonade Blessing” went live on the Unreleased Gems shelf on Wednesday, April 29, 2026. The film sold to Antenna Releasing roughly a month later, and the deal was announced on Thursday, July 2, 2026. Not every title moves that fast — some move faster. Ullom’s “It Ends” landed on Unreleased Gems’ shelf in December and closed a deal almost immediately.

“It Ends” had played the festival circuit for months without producing a real offer. “What we didn’t expect was the kind of marketplace we walked into,” Ullom recently told Filmmaker Magazine. “I don’t think I heard of a single minimum guarantee that was over $50,000, even from mainline distributors.”

Last summer, Ullom was on the Universal lot for an unrelated meeting when he noticed a “Jurassic World: Rebirth” promotional event happening nearby, populated with movie influencers the studio had flown in, according to Fandomwire. He talked his way in by convincing security he was an influencer who’d gotten lost, according to Filmmaker Magazine, and found himself in a room with horror creator and screenwriter Nicolas Curcio. Curcio posted about “It Ends” on Instagram and TikTok on Saturday, July 12, 2025, a video that pulled 970,000 combined views.

That hard-won attention reached Letterboxd. Not long after Curcio’s post, a separate influencer named Kit Lazer also posted about the film, and Letterboxd CEO Matt Buchanan happened to see it, according to Filmmaker Magazine. “They were launching Letterboxd Video Store, and there was this synchronicity at play,” Ullom said, according to the Letterboxd Journal.

Once the film landed on the shelf, the numbers moved fast. Neon acquired the movie on just its eighth day on the platform — the kind of turnaround that makes a trade headline write itself — and from the outside, it looked exactly like what a pitch memo would call it: an immediate groundswell.

Letterboxd’s Mayhew and Head of Strategy George Linehan-Mitchell said what earns a film like “It Ends” a spot on the shelf has less to do with any internal system than either of their titles might suggest. What they watch for is buildup: organic list appearances, viewer chatter, and attention forming off their platform. A title doesn’t get picked because a programmer likes it, it’s selected because the audience’s interest has already made a case for it.

Once a film is actually on the shelf, that same audience interest becomes data a filmmaker can use. Distributors who’d shown no interest in “It Ends” for months suddenly had hard evidence that an audience for it does exist. Watchlist volume jumps an average of 40 times for Unreleased Gems titles specifically, according to figures Letterboxd has publicly cited, numbers a filmmaker can point to that a skeptical buyer can’t wave away.

Between the Letterboxd debut of “It Ends” and Neon picking up the film, total views quadrupled, from 2,530 to 10,830. The data doesn’t force a distributor’s hand so much as it makes waiting harder to justify.

“It Ends” is in theaters today, via Neon. “Lemonade Blessing,” “Tinsman Road,” “Eugene the Marine,” and “The Mysterious Gaze of the Flamingo” have all gone on to wider distribution of their own. Between those five titles, Letterboxd’s Unreleased Gems shelf has built a track record worth watching.

Letterboxd says its membership has climbed past 30 million worldwide, a scale that’s turning what was once a niche logging app into a viable alternative to shopping a film on the traditional festival circuit. That growth makes the platform’s next round of Unreleased Gems worth watching too.

Three new titles join the shelf next Wednesday. “Downbeat” follows a struggling musician who finds a second act performing on the street after his life falls apart. “The Weed Eaters,” a horror-comedy from New Zealand, turns a marijuana binge into an accidental murder spree. The third, “I Only Rest in the Storm,” is a Cannes Film Festival prizewinner from director Pedro Pinho, centered on an engineer from Portugal whose entanglement with two locals forces him to reckon with his country’s colonial history in Africa.

But Mayhew is careful not to let Unreleased Gems’ track record define the shelf. “We would never presume whether these filmmakers want to have a traditional distribution,” she said. Success, to her, doesn’t require a deal at all. “Even if it’s just five really strong ambassadors for these independent gems who will sing their praises and push for it and tell their friends about it,” she said, “that’s something that has value.”