A Tokyo café, a laptop and a new name, 2006 to 2010.

MUBI started with a film its founder could not find. In an interview published on 28 November 2018, the Indian site Film Companion said that Efe Çakarel was sitting in a café in Tokyo at Christmas in 2006 and wanted to watch Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love on his laptop. He assumed it would be online; it was not. On the flight back to San Francisco, the magazine wrote, he sketched a plan for a subscription service streaming films that were hard to find on the internet, and his background in technology, as a graduate of MIT, helped him build it.

The service opened under another name. English Wikipedia says it was founded in 2007 as The Auteurs, and that in 2008 the American home-video label The Criterion Collection partnered with The Auteurs to start a video-on-demand service. Film Companion described the early years as hard going: international rights for independent, arthouse and classic films were difficult to secure, capital was difficult to raise, and moving from computers to other devices took longer than expected. The magazine said the company at one point faced a possible shutdown, with lay-offs and pay cuts.

The name changed in 2010. Wikipedia says The Auteurs became MUBI that year, a two-syllable word with no fixed meaning that comes close to rhyming with “movie”. It quotes the company as wanting “a name all audiences can say and spell, without the burden of exclusionary meaning”. The page notes that the name is usually set in capitals.

A change in the model followed. Film Companion reported that Çakarel decided against an ever-growing library and instead made each film available for thirty days: one new title a day, thirty on the service at any time, chosen by a small team of curators. In his own words to the magazine, the curator is like the person behind the counter of a DVD shop whose recommendations you trust. The same interview named three curators at the time: Daniel Kasman in the New York office, and Anaïs Lebrun and Chiara Marañón at the London headquarters.

A London headquarters, a magazine and a sales company.

MUBI’s base is London. The Hollywood Reporter described it on 14 January 2022 as a London-based company and an art-house streaming platform and theatrical distributor, and said it had offices in New York and Los Angeles as well. Wikipedia describes MUBI as a British streaming platform, production company and film distributor whose catalogue centres on world cinema, documentaries and independent films, and which also distributes some titles in cinemas before they reach the service.

Writing about film has been part of the brand almost from the start. Wikipedia says MUBI publishes Notebook, an online film publication with interviews, features, columns and festival coverage, and that a column called “Movie Poster of the Week”, written by Adrian Curry, has run there since 2009. In 2021, according to the same page, MUBI added Notebook Magazine, an editorially independent print magazine published twice a year in English and sold by subscription and through selected bookshops. Wikipedia also records two podcasts launched in 2021, one in English and one in Spanish.

The company widened from streaming into sales in January 2022. The Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire both reported on 14 January 2022 that MUBI had acquired The Match Factory, a sales company founded in 2006, together with its production arm Match Factory Productions, founded in 2013 by Michael Weber and Viola Fügen. Both reports said the existing management would stay in place and that the company would keep its offices in Berlin and Cologne, while expanding through MUBI’s London headquarters and its American offices. The Hollywood Reporter quoted Çakarel calling the two businesses “highly complementary”.

Further additions are listed on Wikipedia: Mubi Go, a membership that adds a weekly cinema ticket for a selected new release; an annual Mubi Fest, announced in 2023 for cities in Latin America and extended to Europe, the United States and Canada a year later; and a majority stake in the Benelux distributor Cinéart in February 2024. Films it has handled include The Substance (2024), which MUBI released in cinemas in September 2024, and The Mastermind (2025).

A curated service, a magazine and a distributor.

A film company’s identity reaches its audience in a few seconds at a time. The opening ident is the clearest case: a short sequence of motion, music and a wordmark that plays before the first frame of the story, so it has to read in a dark room, on a phone and on a festival screen alike. Many idents are revised over the years, and the changes are usually small — a new typeface, a cleaner animation, a shorter sound cue — so that the mark stays recognisable while it is updated.

Outside the cinema, the identity lives on smaller surfaces. Home-video lines use spine numbers, consistent spine typography and commissioned cover art, which turn a shelf of discs into a single designed object. On posters and trailers, the distributor’s logo usually sits in the billing block or the opening card, sharing space with the film’s own title treatment, so it has to stay legible at small sizes and in one colour. Websites, streaming tiles and social avatars add square and circular crops. For designers, the lesson is that a film-company mark is a system of formats rather than one logo: motion, print, packaging and screen each need their own version.

Seven circles, one typeface and a palette of many colours.

MUBI’s visual identity is built around a symbol of seven dots. On 18 February 2019, It’s Nice That published an account by Lucy Bourton of an update to MUBI’s visual language, unveiled that day and designed by the London studio Spin. The work was led by Spin co-founder Tony Brook with design director Claudia Klat. Çakarel told the magazine the aim was “to tighten things up”: the identity looked consistent from the outside, but posters and even business cards had drifted into other typefaces.

Type was the core of the change. Spin explored several routes and then presented a single option, Riforma, a typeface by the Swiss studio Norm. Brook told It’s Nice That that the face had elegance and sharpness, that its M recalled the M on the original Metropolis poster, and that it worked with the seven-circle symbol. The dots stayed — Brook said there was “no value in change for change’s sake” — but they were redrawn, now facing forward. Spin also introduced a wide palette of colours instead of one or two signature tones, with different colours assigned to different channels such as YouTube and Instagram. Çakarel said he hoped people would one day recognise the seven dots anywhere.

The symbol has since been adapted rather than replaced. It’s Nice That reported on 29 January 2024 that Spin, described as a long-time design partner, had rebranded Mubi Go, the membership with a weekly cinema ticket, by reducing the seven dots to three that spell “Go” and also suggest the hole punched in a ticket stub. The earlier Mubi Go look had relied on bright yellow and black; the new one lets colours follow each film, and the launch was timed to Priscilla. The same report credited Spin with the colours of a 2021 ident made with Yuri Suzuki.

For a design guide, MUBI shows how a fixed symbol and one typeface can carry a brand while colour changes from film to film. Compare it with The Criterion Collection, its early streaming partner, and Searchlight Pictures. For this guide we use matinee yellow, screen navy and projection black with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep MUBI’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.