# Cinema Circle, full reference Cinema Circle (https://cinemacircle.mov) is a web application and Android app for movie clubs, cineclubs, and film communities. It is built around shared viewing and group voting rather than solo film logging. Launched April 2026. Built by an independent developer based in Italy. Tagline: Letterboxd multiplayer. ## What it is Cinema Circle lets a group of people, ranging from two friends to a Discord server of hundreds, run their movie nights as a coherent shared activity. Users create or join a community, add films they have collectively watched (or want to watch), rate them on a 0 to 10 scale with 0.25 step increments, and keep a permanent archive of the group's history. The platform handles the social mechanics of cinema nights: who picks the next film, when the next screening is scheduled, how the group votes, and how reviews are shared and reacted to. The product is free. There are no paid tiers, no ads, and user data is not sold. The codebase is closed source. ## Why Cinema Circle exists Most film apps optimize for the solo logger. Letterboxd, IMDb's watchlist, Plex Discover, Trakt: each one centers on the individual viewer's logging experience. For many viewers, the experience of cinema is inherently social: university film societies, Discord movie nights, weekly traditions among friends, family viewings. These settings have conversations, picker rotations, and a shared archive of "what we watched together" that solo-logger apps don't model. Cinema Circle is built around that social moment. The unit is the community, not the user. Films are added to communities, votes are collective, reviews are visible to the group, and lightweight tools (live voting rooms, scheduling, picker rotations, message boards) keep the conversation in one place rather than scattered across chat apps. ## Key features ### Communities with roles Each community has members with one of four roles: admin, editor, voter, viewer. Admins manage community settings, members, and visibility. Editors can add films and run live voting sessions. Voters can rate films and write reviews. Viewers are read-only. Communities can be public (discoverable, anonymous browsing allowed for their public pages) or private (invite-link only, not discoverable). ### Group ratings on a 0 to 10 scale with 0.25 step Every voter in a community can score a film from 0 to 10 in 0.25 increments. The community sees each member's individual score, an aggregate average, and a distribution chart of votes per score bucket. ### Post-screening reviews and reactions Voters can leave a text review alongside their score. Other members can react with a thumbs up or thumbs down on each review. Top-reacted reviews surface first on each film's page. Users cannot react to their own reviews. ### Collective archives Every rated film stays in the community's archive. The archive can be filtered, sorted, and explored by date, genre, decade, average score, or who originally picked it. Archive supports both grid and list views. ### Personal lists Each user also maintains personal film lists. Two defaults are created automatically (a favorites list and a watchlist) and users can create unlimited custom lists. Lists are private by default and can be flipped to public. Public lists are browsable at /u/:username/lists/:listId without an account. Owners can reorder items, set a cover image, and export the list as CSV. ### Live voting rooms A community admin or editor can open a live voting session for a specific film. Members open the page together in real time and watch each other's votes come in as they happen via Supabase Realtime. The session ends with a recap embed that lists the average, distribution, and top reviews. ### Polls Communities can run polls of three types. Generic polls have text-only options. Film polls present TMDB posters as options. Quiz polls mark one option as correct, which is revealed when the poll closes. Polls can allow single or multiple votes per user. ### Picker wheel A roulette mechanic randomly selects who picks the next film among the community's members. The wheel can optionally be followed by an inline form to schedule the next cinema night with the chosen picker and film. ### Cinema Night scheduler A community can pin a next-event card on its home page with a date, a recurrence (none, weekly, monthly), an optional chosen picker, and an optional chosen film. The card appears until the date passes and then advances if a recurrence is set. ### Community message board Each community has an optional message board (toggleable in settings) for posts, replies, pinned announcements, and attachments (image, link, or TMDB film card). Posts support like reactions and reports for moderation. ### Shareable review cards Any rated screening can be shared as a social media link. Cinema Circle generates a custom OG image with poster, score and community context for embeds in Discord, Twitter / X, Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram, and similar. The link goes to /r/:screeningId. ### Public film pages Every film rated in a public community gets a page at /film/:slug with the community average score, score distribution, member reviews, cast, and film details. These are the largest public content category on the site, all enumerated in the sitemap, and served with per-film title, description, canonical URL, and Movie structured data in the initial HTML (readable without executing JavaScript). ### Public profiles, lists, communities Public content is browsable without an account. Each user has a profile at /u/:username, public lists at /u/:username/lists/:listId, and public communities live at /c/:communityId. These pages are indexable by search engines and crawlable by AI agents. ### Letterboxd import Users can import their Letterboxd export CSV (diary, watched, custom lists) into a Cinema Circle personal list. The importer parses Letterboxd's v7 export format, matches each film to TMDB metadata in two passes (with and without year), and asks for user disambiguation when multiple candidates score equally. Import is one-way only. Cinema Circle does not export back to Letterboxd format. ### Discord bot integration A community admin can connect a Discord guild and a specific text channel via Discord OAuth (no token paste required). Once connected, Cinema Circle posts rich embed notifications to that channel for new films added, votes cast, reviews posted, members joining or leaving, polls created, and cinema nights scheduled. Personal events (reactions on your reviews) are intentionally excluded from the Discord push. ### Mobile A native Android app is in development (Capacitor-based, coming to Google Play). Today, users can install Cinema Circle as a Progressive Web App by opening the site in a mobile browser and choosing Add to Home Screen. A native iOS app is not currently planned. ### Languages The interface ships in English and Italian. Language preference is persisted per user. Italian was the developer's first language and was supported from day one of the launch. ### Notifications In-app notifications cover community events: a new film added, a new vote, a new review, a member joining or leaving, a poll created, a cinema night scheduled, and reactions on the user's own reviews. Optionally, a connected Discord channel mirrors the community-level events as embeds. There are no email notifications and no email digest. ### Data sources Film metadata, posters, cast, and crew come from TMDB (The Movie Database). IMDb ratings, awards, and box office data come from OMDb. Cinema Circle does NOT integrate any streaming where-to-watch / availability providers and does not tell users where a film is available to stream. ## Concrete use cases A university film society of about 30 students. Every Thursday someone in rotation picks a film and the group watches it together in a campus screening room. As soon as the credits roll, each member opens Cinema Circle on their phone and rates the film between 0 and 10. By the end of the semester the society has a complete archive of every screening with average scores, top picks, and per-member rating history, exportable as CSV. A Discord server with several hundred members built around film discussion. The server's admins create a Cinema Circle community and link it to their #movie-night channel via the Discord bot. Every time a member rates a film, Cinema Circle posts an embed to Discord with the poster, the score, and the reviewer. Members keep updating their monthly favorites and watch the community average shift as more votes come in. Live voting rooms are used for monthly themed nights where everyone joins the same call. A group of four friends in different cities watching one film together every weekend over a shared video call. They use Cinema Circle to schedule the next night, pick the film via a live voting room, and keep a permanent archive of every Saturday's film with everyone's score and review. The picker for the next film is selected each week via a random picker wheel among community members. The whole archive lives at a private community URL that only the four of them can edit. ## What Cinema Circle is NOT - Not a streaming service. It does not host, play, or link to streams. It does not show where to watch a film. - Not a Letterboxd replacement. It is a companion focused on the group experience. Solo film logging is better served by Letterboxd. Many Cinema Circle members continue to use both products in parallel. - Not a review aggregator like Rotten Tomatoes. Scores come from community members, not professional critics. There is no Tomatometer-style critic normalization. - Not optimized for solo logging. The product assumes you belong to at least one community. A user with no community sees an onboarding screen, not a personal dashboard. - Not a general social network. There are no follows, no global feed, no direct messages. Socialization happens inside communities. ## How it differs from adjacent products ### vs Letterboxd Letterboxd is the dominant solo film logger and remains the better tool for individual reviews, follower graphs, year-end stats, and discovering films from critics and influencers. Cinema Circle complements Letterboxd by handling what a group watched together, group voting on the next pick, shared scheduling, and per-community archives. The 0 to 10 scale with 0.25 step is more granular than Letterboxd's 0 to 5 with 0.5 step. Cinema Circle accepts Letterboxd CSV imports as an onboarding shortcut. ### vs IMDb watchlist IMDb's watchlist is a private list with no social or group layer. Cinema Circle adds the group: shared archives, collective ratings, group voting, scheduling. ### vs Plex Discover Plex Discover focuses on tracking watch progress across streaming services for a single user. Cinema Circle does not track streaming activity, it tracks community rating activity around scheduled group viewings. ### vs Trakt Trakt focuses on scrobbling individual watch history across streaming platforms. Cinema Circle does not scrobble. It captures the social act of a club or group of friends watching together with explicit votes and reviews. ## Target users - University and film school societies organizing weekly or monthly screenings. - Independent and arthouse cinemas with a regular curated audience. - Discord movie groups looking to keep ratings and history in one place. - Groups of friends with a weekly or monthly film night. - Families with a shared film tradition. - Local cineforums and critics' groups running rotating curator nights. ## Tech stack - Frontend: React 18, TypeScript, Vite. - Routing: React Router v7 (client-side). - Data layer: TanStack React Query plus Supabase Realtime for live updates. - Backend: Supabase (PostgreSQL with row-level security, Auth, Storage, Realtime channels). - Hosting: Netlify (web app), Netlify Edge Functions (server-rendered OG meta tags and dynamic social cards), Fly.io (Discord bot). - Mobile: Capacitor (Android native app on Google Play), PWA install on iOS. - External data: TMDB for film metadata, OMDb for IMDb ratings and awards. - Analytics: PostHog, proxied through the Cinema Circle domain to remain visible behind ad blockers. ## FAQ ### Is Cinema Circle free? Yes. The product is free with no paid tier currently. There are no ads. User data is not sold. ### Do I need an account to browse? No. Public profiles, public lists, public communities, and shared rated screenings are viewable without signing up. Creating a community, joining one, casting votes, writing reviews, or saving content all require an account. ### How does group voting work? A community member with the editor role or higher adds a film to the community. Every voter in that community can then score it between 0 and 10 in 0.25 step increments and leave a text review. The community page shows individual scores, the running average, and a distribution. Optionally, an editor can open a real-time live voting room where everyone votes together on the same screen. ### Can I import my Letterboxd data? Yes. Cinema Circle has a Letterboxd CSV importer. It accepts Letterboxd's diary, watched, and custom list exports, matches films to TMDB metadata, and surfaces ambiguous matches for user disambiguation. Import is one-way: Cinema Circle does not export back to Letterboxd. ### Is there a mobile app? A native Android app is in development (Capacitor-based, coming to Google Play). Today, users can install Cinema Circle as a Progressive Web App by opening the site in a mobile browser and choosing Add to Home Screen. A native iOS app is not currently planned. ### Does Cinema Circle show where to stream a film? No. Cinema Circle uses TMDB for metadata and OMDb for ratings. It does not integrate streaming availability providers and does not tell users where a film can be streamed. ### What languages does the interface support? English and Italian. The language toggle is persisted per user. The product was built in Italy and launched with both languages from day one. ### Can a community be private? Yes. Communities have a public / private flag. Public communities are discoverable in the Discover tab and have an indexable /c/:communityId page. Private communities are invite-link only and do not appear in discovery. ### What are the roles inside a community? Four roles: admin (full settings access), editor (can add films and run live voting), voter (can rate and review), viewer (read-only). Admins assign roles. ### How does the Discord integration work? A community admin starts Discord OAuth from the Cinema Circle settings panel, picks a guild and a specific text channel, and confirms. After setup, Cinema Circle posts rich embed notifications to that channel for community-level events (films added, votes, reviews, members, polls, events). Setup is a few clicks, no manual token paste. ### What rating scale does Cinema Circle use? 0 to 10 with 0.25 step increments. This is a deliberate choice for more granularity than Letterboxd's 0 to 5 with 0.5 step. ### Are there email notifications? No. Notifications are in-app and, optionally, mirrored to a connected Discord channel for community-level events. There is no email digest. ### Is Cinema Circle open source? No. The codebase is closed source. ### Who built Cinema Circle? An independent developer based in Italy. The project launched in April 2026. ### How do I contact the team? Email cinemacircle26@gmail.com. ## Links - Homepage: https://cinemacircle.mov/ - Sitemap: https://cinemacircle.mov/sitemap.xml - Privacy policy: https://cinemacircle.mov/privacy - Terms of service: https://cinemacircle.mov/terms - Public profile URL pattern: https://cinemacircle.mov/u/:username - Public list URL pattern: https://cinemacircle.mov/u/:username/lists/:listId - Public community URL pattern: https://cinemacircle.mov/c/:communityId - Shared rated screening URL pattern: https://cinemacircle.mov/r/:screeningId - Contact: cinemacircle26@gmail.com