Cinema Circle
Cinema Circle
Cinema Circle didn't start as a product. It started as a small site for me and my friends.
In mid-2025 I built a small film site just for my friends. It wasn't a platform: one site, for one group.
Then my colleagues wanted something similar. I could have made them a copy. I thought about it the other way round instead: a layer of communities, where any group could have its own space.
That became a new project, separate from the first site. Its first commit is from 19 February 2026, and it was called Cinema Night. I worked on it for two days, and then it sat there for six weeks.
At the start of April I went back to it, and this time I didn't stop. The commit from 3 April just says "Tantissima roba": Italian for "a whole lot of stuff". The next day the app got an English translation, a new name and a new icon. Cinema Night became Cinema Circle.
On 7 April it was open to everyone. The rest came quickly. Live voting arrived on 9 April, to score a film together when the credits roll. Polls came next, then the club board, the Letterboxd import and, at the end of the month, the first Android build.
Today the clubs on Cinema Circle are groups of friends, Discord servers and people I've never met. That changes how you build. A setting that makes sense for my friends might not suit a club of forty, so most features became options that each club can switch on or off.
As I write this, in November 2026, there are 33 public clubs with 168 members and 632 films, plus the private ones, which I don't count here. That isn't huge, and I would rather say so.
It's still built by one person in Italy. It's free, with no ads, and user data isn't sold. The film is still the excuse: what the app really keeps is the history of a group of people.
And my friends are still on it. They're still the first to tell me when something doesn't work.
Tommaso
Cinema Circle (cinemacircle.mov) is not affiliated with the CinemaCircle Discord bot at cinemacircle.app.