At the end of November, I wrote about a new Letterboxd list I’d handmade that compiled The Letterboxd and IMDb Top 250 lists and cross-referenced those with The Criterion Collection. [1] I called it “Closing The Loops,” as its goal was to help me determine some low-hanging fruit in Letterboxd’s 16 featured lists on stats page. Knowing I could take this further, I wrote a script.
The script, written in Python, uses the Letterboxd API to fetch the list members of all 16 featured lists,[2] filter out duplicate films while counting their appearances, then sort them in order of those appearances. The result is a complete collation of 2,704 unique films in CSV form. I then import this to the list on the website as a full replacement.
This upgraded version of “Closing The Loops” is complete with notes detailing which lists each film appears on. The breakdown of appearances is as follows:
Films appearing on 9 lists: 6
Films appearing on 8 lists: 16
Films appearing on 7 lists: 26
Films appearing on 6 lists: 31
Films appearing on 5 lists: 64
Films appearing on 4 lists: 119
Films appearing on 3 lists: 248
Films appearing on 2 lists: 454
Films appearing on 1 list: 1,740
Further, I have made a Closing The Loops (Criterion Edition) companion to this list, filtering what's seen here with what's available in the Criterion Collection. You may find this useful when taking on the Criterion Challenge. I’m happy to see there’s been a good amount of interest in both versions of the list in the first week of availability.
This is my first public use of the Letterbox API. I hope to find ways to simplify the script further as I become more accustomed to the endpoints available. In the future, I plan to set up automated updates to this list as well that will remove the need for manual uploads. Until then, I’ll run updates every few weeks.