$letters = Movie::selectRaw('substr(title,1,1) as first')->lists('first');
// remove duplicates
array_unique($letters);
// you may want to sort the letters as well
array_unique($letters, SORT_LOCALE_STRING);
// and you may want to reset the keys
array_values(array_unique($letters, SORT_LOCALE_STRING));
@djave_co You can remove get(). pluck() will execute the query so get() is extra there. You also probably don't really need toArray(). It still returns an eloquent collection, which is an array you can iterate over.