🎬 Letterboxd Scraper — Films, Ratings, Reviews & User Data

Scrape films, ratings, cast & crew, genres, and user reviews from Letterboxd, the world's leading social film-discovery platform. This Apify Actor extracts structured data from Letterboxd film pages, user profiles, curated lists, and keyword search — perfect for anyone who needs a Letterboxd reviews API alternative or a clean Letterboxd dataset. Export everything to JSON or CSV for recommendation engines, sentiment analysis, and film research.

Letterboxd has no public API, so its website is the only data source. This scraper turns it into queryable, paginated, structured output — no manual copy-paste required.

✨ What this Actor does / Key features

• 4 scrape modes — film details, user watch history, curated lists, and keyword search.
• Ratings & reviews — Letterboxd average rating, total ratings count, and full user review text with reviewer username, star rating, like count, and spoiler flag.
• Rich film metadata — director, top cast (up to 10), genres, runtime, language, country, tagline, and poster URL.
• User profile scraping — extract a user's watched-film history with their personal star ratings.
• List scraping — scrape any public Letterboxd list (Top 250, decade lists, genre collections, user-curated lists).
• Keyword search — find films by title or theme, then follow through to full detail pages.
• Automatic pagination — all multi-page modes are handled automatically.
• Residential proxy support — Letterboxd blocks datacenter IPs, so residential proxy is built in for reliable runs.
• NLP-ready output — clean, HTML-stripped review text, with a type field to filter records by kind.

🔍 Input

Field	Type	Description
mode	string (enum)	Required. What to scrape: film (metadata + embedded reviews), user (watched films + ratings), list (films from a curated list), search (films matching a keyword).
startUrls	array	Letterboxd URLs to scrape — film pages, user profiles, or list pages. The scraper auto-detects the URL type.
searchQueries	array	Film titles or keywords to search for. Used when mode is search.
scrapeReviews	boolean	When enabled, parses the popular reviews embedded on each film page (reviewer, rating, text, likes, spoiler flag). Default true.
maxReviews	integer	Maximum embedded reviews to extract per film (0–200). Letterboxd typically shows up to 6–12 popular reviews per page.
maxFilms	integer	Maximum total film records to save (1–1000). Applies to user, list, and search modes. Default 50.
proxyConfiguration	object	Proxy settings. Residential proxy is strongly recommended — Letterboxd blocks datacenter IPs.

🚀 Example input

{
  "mode": "film",
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://letterboxd.com/film/the-godfather/" },
    { "url": "https://letterboxd.com/film/inception/" }
  ],
  "scrapeReviews": true,
  "maxReviews": 50,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true,
    "apifyProxyGroups": ["RESIDENTIAL"]
  }
}

Scrape a curated list:

{
  "mode": "list",
  "startUrls": [
    { "url": "https://letterboxd.com/dave/list/official-top-250-narrative-feature-films/" }
  ],
  "maxFilms": 250
}

📦 Output

The dataset contains film records and review records, distinguished by the type field.

Film record

Field	Description
type	Record type: film, user_film, list_film, or search_result.
filmSlug	Letterboxd film slug (e.g. the-godfather).
title	Film title.
year	Release year.
director	Director name(s).
cast	Top cast members (up to 10).
genres	Genre list.
runtime	Runtime in minutes.
averageRating	Letterboxd average rating (0–5 scale).
ratingsCount	Total number of ratings.
language	Primary language.
country	Country of origin.
tagline	Film tagline or synopsis.
posterUrl	Film poster image URL.
filmUrl	Direct Letterboxd URL.
scrapedAt	ISO timestamp of extraction.

Review record (type: review)

Field	Description
filmSlug	Film the review belongs to.
filmTitle	Film title.
reviewer	Reviewer's Letterboxd username.
rating	Reviewer's star rating (0–5).
reviewText	Full, HTML-stripped review text.
reviewDate	Date of the review.
likes	Number of likes on the review.

💡 Use cases

• AI & recommendation engines — build training datasets from Letterboxd's nuanced, cinephile-accurate community ratings.
• Sentiment analysis — extract thousands of user reviews with star ratings for NLP training and opinion mining.
• Film research & journalism — analyze rating distributions, genre trends, and director reception at scale.
• List intelligence — scrape famous community lists for editorial and recommendation projects.
• Audience profiling — extract user watch histories to understand viewing patterns and taste profiles.

❓ Frequently Asked Questions

Does Letterboxd have an API? Why use a scraper? Letterboxd has no public API, so its website is the only source of this data. This Actor delivers structured JSON/CSV instead of manual browsing, with full pagination and batch processing.

Do I need a login or API key? No login or API key is needed — you only need an Apify account. Profiles and lists you scrape must be public.

Is it legal to scrape Letterboxd? The Actor accesses publicly available pages on Letterboxd. Use the data responsibly, in line with Letterboxd's terms of service, and respect reasonable request rates.

Why is residential proxy required? Letterboxd actively blocks datacenter IP addresses. The Actor defaults to the RESIDENTIAL Apify proxy group for reliable, uninterrupted runs — keep this setting enabled.

How many reviews can I get per film? Letterboxd shows a limited set of popular reviews on each film page (typically 6–12). maxReviews caps how many of those are saved per film, up to 200.

Can I scrape a user's full watch history? Yes. Use mode: user with the profile URL — the scraper reads the user's films list and their personal ratings, up to maxFilms.

What output formats are supported? JSON, CSV, Excel (XLSX), HTML, and JSONLines, available through the Apify dataset and API. Use the type field to filter film vs review records.

⏰ Scheduling & integration

Schedule the Actor on Apify to keep film, rating, and review datasets fresh, and export to JSON or CSV for ML pipelines and spreadsheets. Call it from the Apify API or connect it to Google Sheets, databases, or notebooks via webhooks and no-code tools like Make and Zapier.

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