Parasite, you guys. What a year it’s having. First, it cleans up during festival season, being the first South Korean film to win Cannes’ coveted Palme d’Or Award. Then it continues its dominance through awards season, capping it off by cleaning up at the Oscars, including winning Best Picture. Its run at the box office has also been dominant; Parasite is now the 4th-highest-grossing foreign language film of all time in the U.S., with projections putting it in 2nd place by the time it leaves theaters.

And now, it’s broken one more cool record that isn’t going to see it earning any more money or hardware but is a mark of just how beloved this film has been and how well-received by audiences. Eagle-eyed Twitter user Sahil (@DoodleBunny64) spotted that Parasite just broke a long-held record on Letterboxd:

A few minutes later, the official Letterboxd account confirmed, it was indeed in the top spot:

This may not seem like a big deal. It’s certainly not nearly as impressive as Parasite‘s awards season wins. Still, it’s a significant achievement and important in terms of measuring the impact Parasite has had purely because Letterboxd isn’t a site for professional film criticism or awards voting body. How many times have we seen films that critics and industry professionals rave over but that the general public fails to embrace (or doesn’t even know about)? How many times have we seen a movie on Rotten Tomatoes with an excellent rating from critics receive a far lower rating from regular fans (or vice-versa)?

Such is usually the case with indie and foreign films, which often fail to generate much buzz beyond the film industry. That’s not a comment on their quality, but rather on how hard it is for a film without known stars or a known director and with little marketing budget to break through the noise to a wider audience. Generally speaking, if you don’t have a big studio budget behind you, good luck getting your film out there to the general public. And better luck getting them to care.

Letterboxd, however, isn’t a professional film criticism site, but a populist one, referring to itself as “a social network for sharing your taste in film.” There are plenty of professional film critics who use it for fun, but its main goal is to recreate the word-of-mouth experience of telling your friends about movies you like on a social media platform level. For Parasite to not only keep pace with but surpass arguably the most well-loved and respected comic book movie of all time is really saying something, and what it says is that Parasite has now broken outside the narrow sphere of the film industry into a much wider audience. The last foreign-language film to have even close to this same pop culture impact in the U.S. was Pan’s Labyrinth all the way back in 2006 – and even then, Guillermo del Toro’s haunting film was limited to technical categories and Best Foreign Language Film at the Oscars (which it was only nominated for but didn’t win). So, arguably, there has never been another foreign-language film quite like Parasite in the U.S.

So What’s Changed?

For starters, the most obvious: Launched in 2011, Letterboxd now exists where it didn’t back in 2006 when Pan’s Labyrinth was released. In general, social media itself exists: Twitter was founded in 2006. Facebook has only been around since 2004 and wasn’t made public until 2006. Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011. Other more niche social media networks all came later. Positive word-of-mouth is now a lot easier to spread among moviegoers.

The ubiquitousness of streaming platforms has made it easier than ever to see movies that would have been almost impossible to see a few years ago, from small indies to foreign films to VOD releases. This has made audiences smarter and more engaged with content than before, even if they’re not necessarily engaging in a traditional moviegoing experience.

Modern audiences are also hungrier than ever for diverse, inclusive content that offers a spectrum of human experience. Thanks to TV, fans have embraced genre programming; dark and weird and complex no longer turns mainstream audiences off. We embrace it now. Plenty of movie watchers are more open than ever to watching fare from other countries, no longer writing it off as too hard or too alien to understand.

And, yes, of course, don’t underestimate the power of winning Best Picture. The Oscars may not have the cultural impact they once did, but movies that are nominated for Best Picture still see a post-Oscars bump at the box office, with the Best Picture winner seeing an even bigger boost. Parasite being the first-ever foreign-language film to win Best Picture, rather than turning people off, intrigued them further. Novelty always does.

Don’t mistake me, however. All of these factors simply put Parasite in a position to be seen and appreciated by a wider audience. But had it not been one of the best-made and most interesting films in years, it would not have broken out as it has. That, director Bong Joon Ho and team did all on their own. It’s just incredibly cool that the rest of America is finally catching up.