Movie Culture, Curated.

Reelizer began in early 2011, while I was freelancing for Mondo. That work sparked something. I started combing Etsy, Behance, Tumblr — anywhere posters, illustrations, albums, and books were hiding. What I found felt like a new generation of movie art, and I had to share it. In a week, I spun up an ExpressionEngine site and started cataloging.

It started small. Then a link from Daring Fireball blew up the site — and the server. By 2015, I'd moved to Austin to work full-time at Alamo Drafthouse, and ExpressionEngine was going obsolete. Posts slowed. I put the site on hiatus — briefly a Tumblr — and told myself I'd relaunch when I knew what I wanted it to be.

That hiatus stretched into ten years. In that time, alt-movie-poster sites multiplied, and the boutique-movie-merch space grew alongside them. When Reelizer came back, it needed to be different — covering the whole art culture around movies, not just posters. I'm a web designer and developer by day, so the tech had to hold up. I'd been experimenting with Craft CMS, built by the shop that originally made ExpressionEngine plugins. Its content model was flexible enough to shape the data the way I wanted. In 2021, I started rebuilding. In fits and starts, I've rebuilt the structure and reworked the design — repeatedly.

It wasn't until my mentor and my mother died, back-to-back this year, that I found the urgency to bring it back. Working on Reelizer was an escape. I could bury my head in code and lose myself in the art.

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