The LOVEFiLM Letters: 200 Not Out!

Tony Blair was still PM. Tom Cruise hadn't flipped out, Martin Scorsese hadn't won the Oscar and Nick Park was working on something called "Wallace & Gromit and the Great Vegetable Plot".

It seems like only yesterday, but the very first LOVEFiLM weekly newsletter went out at the beginning of May 2004, and four years later we're celebrating our 200th edition.

Who woulda thunk it?

Online DVD rentals hadn't made much impact at the time - the business was still in its infancy. It wasn't until the end of 2004 that we reached 50, 000 subscribers. These days we're knocking on the door of almost one million subscribers across Europe.

Online DVD rental has seen consistent growth since its inception and we're pleased that we've been able to support that business with editorial content, even though we were unsure if people would read it at first.

Fortunately there were enough of us who thought it would be fun to find out. We knew that if we weren't honest about the bad films no one would believe us about the good, so I was granted leave to give my opinion in my own name - a rare privilege when so many companies just want us to buy into the hype.

It seems to have paid off. Just as LOVEFiLM has grown and grown, so has our web content. If I remember right (none of us kept a copy) that first newsletter was a svelte 350 words short, and most of the early reviews were equally terse. The first I recall was The Day After Tomorrow, and it wasn't exactly a rave - though I did admit to enjoying the silliness.

The focus then (as now) was on cinema releases, the constantly evolving, living, breathing culture of movies (early newsletter topics were sports movies, Ewan McGregor, Bill Murray and The Passion Of The Christ). By week two we were off to Cannes, for the first of what has become an annual pilgrimage to the world's most glamorous film festival. (We'll be back again next week.)

So what has changed? Well, I've got more long-winded - sorry! But look how much more there is to enjoy across the board. Interviews have been part of the mix almost from day one, but the archive now includes such superstars as Will Smith, John Travolta, Cameron Diaz, Bruce Willis, Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett and Michael Caine. We've talked to up-and-coming British filmmakers (Paul Greengrass, Edgar Wright, Garth Jennings twice already), and some legendary figures (Ang Lee, Paul Verhoeven, John Carpenter) from further afield.

These days we're also on the red carpet, reporting from world premieres in Leicester Square, and chatting on video with Sean Penn, Adrien Brody and Matthew McConaughey. We're on the third issue of our digital magazine.There are daily news updates, quizzes and competitions. And most importantly, there are several thousand film reviews written by you, and for which we're all sincerely grateful. (You can also contribute to our new LOVEFiLM Wiki pages.)

I estimate I've written about 700 LOVEFiLM reviews myself. Personal favourites from the last four years would include Batman Begins, Before Sunset, Shaun of the Dead, Kung Fu Hustle, Letters from Iwo Jima, Birth, Borat, The Three Burials Of Melquiades Estrada and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby. Oh, and that Wallace And Gromit movie I mentioned at the top - which was retitled "Curse of the Were Rabbit".

Thanks, then, for reading, for watching and for writing, for making this site a real community of film lovers, which is all we ever hoped for when we set off on this journey four short years ago.

Tom Charity
tom.charity@lovefilm.com