I Tried Binge, a Letterboxd Alternative That I Now Like Better Than Letterboxd Itself.
The aptly named Binge is a new app for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that aims to compete with Letterboxd . Like that popular movie-focused social network, Binge lets you keep track of what you’ve watched and what you want to watch. But while Letterboxd is primarily focused on movies, Binge covers both movies and TV shows and adds “sudden scare alerts”—an innovative feature Letterboxd doesn’t offer (though I had mixed results in my testing).
Tracking my viewing is something I really need help with, and although I’ve had a Letterboxd account for a while, I rarely log in or update my viewing history. Since Binge offers a single place to track both movies and TV shows, I decided to give it a try—and despite the aforementioned issues with its main feature, overall I liked what I found.
Use Binge to track movies and TV shows.
Registration is not required to use Binge, but if you do, you can sync your activity across multiple Apple devices. The interface features three tabs for browsing new and popular content: Discover , Movies , and TV Shows . The final tab is Library , where your viewing activity is recorded.
Tracking is very simple: you can mark movies or TV shows as watched or as ones you’d like to watch in the future; for TV shows, you can also record how many episodes you’ve watched. All of this is then displayed as a timeline on your library page. (One feature I like outside of Letterboxd is the ability to randomly select movies or TV shows from your wishlist—great for when you just can’t decide what to watch.)
Overall, Binge is simpler than Letterboxd, which crams a ton of options—watching, rating, adding to lists, and sharing—into a single pop-up window. While that app offers more features, it also feels cluttered. Binge offers only the most essential features, which is a plus for a low-maintenance media tracking app like myself.
The same applies to the built-in search: Letterboxd’s is much more comprehensive, allowing you to drill down into categories like genre, year of release, and cast and crew. Binge offers a simpler keyword search for finding movies or people associated with a particular film.
However, Binge is impressive in the amount of information it provides for each film or series. In addition to cast and crew lists, there are trailers, ratings from around the internet, awards and nominations, information on which streaming app you need to watch a particular film or series, and a parental guide that flags anything that may be scary, violent, or otherwise suitable for an adult audience.
The “Library” tab is well-designed, with everything organized in an easy-to-read format, though you can create movie and TV show collections for a more organized experience. I loved the idea of the “Your Next View” section, which recommends movies and TV shows based on what you’ve already watched, and it offered me some interesting suggestions.
Binge offers a wide range of interface customization options, so if you don’t care about certain features—for example, movie reviews or awards lists—you can disable them with a single tap. You can also reduce the brightness of certain effects, such as parallax and flickering, which are enabled by default.
The system for tracking sudden jump scares is a great idea, but it didn’t quite work for me.
I’m not a big fan of horror and violence—I genuinely don’t enjoy being scared or disgusted—so watching movies can be a challenge. Some of the most critically acclaimed and popular films contain these elements, and so I find myself wanting to watch them, but also afraid of being psychologically traumatized.
Binge offers a solution to this problem in the form of jump scare alerts: many movie title pages display a timeline showing exactly when the jump scare will occur and details of what will happen (so beware of spoilers). There’s a timer that can be started when you start watching, which is supposed to send a jump scare alert to your phone in the form of a “Live Activity” before the scary scene begins. However, while the timeline screen was clear enough, I couldn’t get the Live Activity notifications to consistently appear—the app seemed to lose track of what was being tracked and when, and there’s no way to manually change the elapsed time once a movie or show has started. Still, the jump scare alert timeline itself is useful. The scares are divided into minor and major categories, and if you don’t mind being warned about a plot twist or two in advance, they’re handy if you want to know when to close your eyes.
Unfortunately, jump scare tables aren’t available for every film. My search found that films like The Invisible Man (2020) and Prometheus (2012) offer them, but they’re missing for older films like The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Single White Female (1992). I’m not sure where Binge gets its data (possibly from the website WhenJumpScare ), but it’s not guaranteed to be available for every film.
Another drawback: Binge’s sudden jump scares are a paid add-on feature. To access them, you’ll need a monthly ($1.99), annual ($17.99), or lifetime ($49.99) subscription. A subscription also unlocks several other features, such as episode rating charts, the ability to create custom movie posters (also a paid feature on Letterboxd), and reminders about upcoming movies and TV shows.
The app also ranks highly for its data import and export tools. You can upload existing information from your Trakt, Letterboxd, and iMDb accounts and export all logged data to a JSON file for use elsewhere. You can also sync activity with Trakt , although this is another paid feature.
Binge is a worthy alternative to Letterboxd.
While avid movie buffs will still prefer Letterboxd—not least because of its built-in community and sharing features—Binge is a worthy alternative for everyone else. It takes just a few minutes to get started, everything is neatly organized and easy to navigate, and there are plenty of nice little touches. Perhaps this will finally motivate me to more carefully track my media consumption.