Movie Culture, Curated.

Reelizer began in early 2011, while I was a freelance designer and developer for Mondo. As a massive fan of movies and an art lover, I found the project very inspiring. That spark ignited a curiosity for combing through Etsy, Behance, Tumblr, and other creative sites for more posters, illustrations, albums, and books. The work I uncovered was so compelling and genuinely felt like the birth of a new generation of movie-related art that I had to share it. Over the course of a week, I spun up an ExpressionEngine installation and started cataloging all of my favorite discoveries.

Over the next couple of years, I continued to add to the collection and expand the gallery. It garnered a small following in the beginning, and thanks to a link from Daring Fireball, the website (and my website server) was sent into the stratosphere. By 2015, my posting cadence began to slow, partly due to my move to Austin, TX, to work full-time for Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and partly because the ExpressionEngine software it was built on was growing obsolete. I put the site on hiatus, momentarily turning it into a Tumblr blog, then decided to relaunch the project when I knew exactly what I wanted to do with it.

That hiatus stretched into a ten-year-long break. In that time, I watched as the number of "alternative movie poster" sites grew, with the boutique movie merchandise space growing alongside it. I knew when Reelizer relaunched, it needed to be different from these other sites, and that encompassing all of the appreciation processes around movies—not just posters—was the way to do it. I'm a web designer and developer by day, so the technology behind it also needed to be solid. Thankfully, I had been watching and experimenting with a new content platform called Craft CMS, which was created by a developer shop that originally made ExpressionEngine plugins. It had a very flexible content model, allowing me to structure the data in a rich and connected way. In 2021, I finally resolved to rebuild it from the ground up. In fits and starts over the past few years, I have reconstructed the content structure in various ways and reworked the site design numerous times.

It wasn't until the back-to-back sudden deaths of my mentor and my mother this year that I found a renewed sense of urgency to get this passion project back into existence. Working on Reelizer was a nice escape where I could bury my head in code and lose myself in the many beautiful pieces of art I would find.

In September 2025, after years of rebirths, deaths, and detours, Reelizer finally relaunched.