I built Movie Planner — a full watchlist & movie/TV planning tool after my wife and I got tired of chaotic notes, screenshots and scattered links

Hi everyone!

My name is Nikita. A couple of months ago my wife and I realized we were watching way less than we wanted to — because our “to-watch” list lived in Telegram chats, screenshots, random notes and favorites across 3–4 apps. Nothing that we planned was getting actually watched.

So I built Movie Planner — a proper long-term planning service for movies and TV shows.

⚠️ The service is currently Russian-language only.

How Movie Planner differs from typical "what to watch tonight" tools

Many existing tools focus on helping you pick one movie right now — often based on mood, group size, or quick recommendations. They’re great for spontaneous evenings when you just can’t decide. Movie Planner is built differently — for long-term, ongoing management:

• you build and maintain a real, persistent watchlist (personal or shared in a group chat)
• plan actual viewing dates & times (at home or in the cinema)
• set smart reminders
• attach and store cinema tickets (bot sends them back before the session)
• track TV series episodes, mark progress, subscribe to new seasons with notifications
• Everything stays organized, nothing gets lost in chats or bookmarks so you actually end up watching more.

What Movie Planner actually does (key features that make it different):

• Permanent watchlist — personal or shared in group chats (add friends/family → everyone sees and adds to the same list)

• Real planning with reminders — set “Saturday 8pm” or “tomorrow evening” → bot reminds you + shows your notes/tickets

• Cinema mode with tickets — upload ticket photos/files → bot sends them back 10 min before the session

• TV series tracker — mark episodes as watched, see progress, subscribe to new episodes (notification when next one drops)

• One-click adding — send link from Kinopoisk/IMDb/Letterboxd or use Chrome extension → film added instantly

• Web dashboard (read-only) — view your lists, upcoming plans, ratings in clean browser view (login via one-time code from Telegram, no passwords)

• Group chats support — perfect for friends planning movie nights or family tracking a shared series

No AI mood picker or snack recipes (yet 😄), but it also solves the real pain: “we have 47 films saved but never watch anything because we forget / lose links / don’t plan”.

Project Architecture

The Telegram bot is written in Python using pyTelegramBotAPI and runs on Railway. PostgreSQL is used as the database with RLock for thread-safe operations in a multi-threaded setup. The architecture is modular — handlers are split by features (series, planning, search, recommendations) for easy maintenance. Background tasks (reminders, new episode notifications, premiere checks) run via APScheduler with user timezone support. It integrates with the unofficial Kinopoisk API for movie/TV data. Recommendations use sentence-transformers embeddings + FAISS for similarity search (planning to switch to LLM API later). Payments go through YooKassa, and the web layer (webhooks + extension API) is built on Flask.

Browser Extension

The extension is Manifest V3 compliant. Content scripts detect movies/series/episodes on Kinopoisk, IMDb, Letterboxd, and 10+ streaming sites (IVI, Okko, Amediateka, etc.) by parsing DOM. It shows a widget on watch pages for one-click episode marking. All data is stored locally in chrome.storage.local. Background.js (service worker) handles secure API calls and authorization via one-time Telegram codes. Sync is instant — items added in the extension appear in the bot immediately.

Current status

• Russian-language only (Kinopoisk integration is very deep)
• ~200 hours of pure vibecoding and iterative building, driven by real UX pain and my own usage (no ads, no data selling)
• Monetization only for optional premium (extended series tracking, priority reminders etc.)
• Actively used by ~few hundred people so far (friends → friends of friends)

Links

• Telegram bot: https://t.me/movie_planner_bot
• Chrome extension: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/movie-planner-bot/fldeclcfcngcjphhklommcebkpfipdol
• Website + read-only dashboard: https://movie-planner.ru
• GitHub (open source): https://github.com/zapnikita95/movie_planner_bot

I’d love to hear from you:

• Would you be interested in an English version of this service? I could adapt it for IMDb/TMDB APIs and translate the interface if there’s demand.
• How do you currently handle your watchlists / series tracking / movie night planning?
• Does a tool focused on long-term planning + reminders + shared lists + cinema tickets make sense for you?
• What features are you missing in existing apps (Trakt, Letterboxd, TV Time, etc.)?

Thanks for reading — any feedback is super welcome!