Rider Strong Stopped Rating Films On Letterboxd For Sake Of Career

When this Boxd meets world… While Letterboxd has become a popular destination for moviegoers, Rider Strong is cautioning fellow industry folk from getting too comfortable on the platform.

The Boy Meets World alum recently explained that he’s “stopped revealing my star count on Letterboxd” so not to prematurely burn bridges with potential collaborators in projects he wants to write or direct.

“It’s more to do with people I want to work with,” he noted on the Pod Meets World podcast. “I realized that if I’m asking an actor to be in a movie that I’m writing or that I want to direct, if I’ve rated one of their films half a star, that’s not a good look because people check each other’s Letterboxd. So I decided for the sake of my professional career.”

Strong added of his Letterboxd ratings, “I’m extremist. So my problem, my approach is, I love it or I hate it. Whereas, like a lot of people, you look at their Letterboxd, you can see their average rating and they usually fall around the three-star mark. Mine are like a complete flat line because I [give] either half a star or five. So I’m extreme.”

Since taking a more self-censored approach to Letterboxd, Strong said he’s “only removed, I would say, half of my star ratings,” but the rest “are still out there.”

After launching in 2011, Letterboxd has become a popular platform since the COVID pandemic, surpassing 17 million subscribers with its social media features that allow cinephiles to log the movie’s they’ve see, rate them and review them. The owner of the New Zealand-founded brand, which has even become a red carpet fixture, began exploring a sale of the platform earlier this year.