Audience Reactions to Black Marxist films as seen on Letterboxd and IMDb

This study explores how general audiences, and professional critics engage with Black Marxist films on Letterboxd and IMDb. Letterboxd and IMDb are review platforms that anyone can join, where many different people are going to be contribute their thoughts, reviews, and interpretations to certain films. A qualitative thematic analysis was executed on 160 general audience and professional reviews of the films The Spook Who Sat by the Door (1973), Babylon (1980), Bamboozled (2000), and Sorry to Bother You (2018). These films were chosen because of their depiction and criticism of race under capitalist systems. They highlight systemic racial issues and portray forms of resistance. This analysis examined how labor, class, race, and political resistance are received. Thematic analysis is important in this scenario because it requires recognizing key words shown in all the reviews, generating codes, seeing common themes and messages in the reviews from the coding, reviewing the themes and their significance to views on Black Marxism. The analysis gives a comprehensive method in reporting accurate data in people's views on Black Marxist films. The theoretical frameworks of Media Effects Theory, Conflict Theory, Marxist Conflict Theory, Communication Theory, and Black Marxist Theory were used in this study. Through these frameworks, the key themes of Identity and Representation, Media and Cultural Critique, Historical and Social Context, Political Agency and Resistance, Labor and Capitalism, Film Form and Aesthetics, and Emotional and Personal Impact emerge. The results show that both professional critics and general audiences engaged with these films on a deep emotional and intellectual level. The professional critics often reference the historical significance of the films and the political context they are in. The general audiences tended to note how emotionally and personally significant it was for them. This study also explores how neoliberal ideologies seen in mainstream media can possibly influence audience reception. The results find that the reviewers on Letterboxd and IMDb view these films as forms of cultural resistance that resonate with them on a personal and intellectual level.