Cinemas — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each point is a cinema — a feature tagged `amenity=cinema` in OpenStreetMap. 31,112 of them worldwide, drawn as a dot sized by the footprint of the building.

Click any feature to see what OpenStreetMap records about it — who runs it, and its website. Where it has a Wikipedia article, a short summary is fetched live and shown in your own language; and every feature links to the OpenStreetMap object it came from.

This is the most globally even cultural map on HueMaps

Most maps on this site, however carefully built, end up showing western Europe in detail and everywhere else faintly. This one does so less than any other cultural layer here, and it is the only layer where India has more features than Germany: 2,182 against 1,454, with China third on 1,322.

| | cinemas | per million people | |---|---|---| | United States | 5,500 | 16.4 | | India | 2,182 | 1.5 | | France | 2,170 | 31.8 | | Germany | 1,454 | 17.5 | | China | 1,322 | 0.9 | | United Kingdom | 838 | 12.4 | | Brazil | 631 | 2.9 | | Japan | 519 | 4.2 | | Australia | 408 | 15.3 | | Indonesia | 194 | 0.7 | | Nigeria | 46 | 0.2 |

The two columns tell opposite stories and both are true. India has the second most cinemas of anywhere measured, and among the fewest per person. A country of 1.4 billion people with 2,182 mapped cinemas has roughly one for every 650,000 residents; France has one for every 31,000. If you only read the left column you would think India well served; if you only read the right you would miss that it has more cinemas than France and Germany combined.

Germany's rate is about 11 times India's. That is the third lowest figure on this whole site, behind only water towers and markets — and neither of those is somewhere people go for pleasure. Whatever else is unevenly mapped, cinemas are close to being a genuinely worldwide subject.

The usual caution still applies: these are counts of what has been mapped, not what exists. India in particular has a large single-screen sector that is less completely mapped than its multiplexes.

Why this map has no colours

The useful division would be a multiplex against a single-screen picture house, and OpenStreetMap has a tag for it: `screen`, the number of screens. It is recorded on far too few features to colour a map by.

So instead the map is sized by footprint, which draws the same distinction honestly. A multiplex and a village cinema differ on the ground by an order of magnitude, and the size of the dot shows it without claiming to know a number nobody recorded.

Tags like `cinema:3D` describe what a showing is like rather than what the place is, so they are not used here either.

The biggest cinemas on the map are drive-ins

The largest features on this layer are drive-in cinemas, and unlike most of this site's outliers they are not a tagging problem — a drive-in's footprint really is its car park, so it genuinely covers ten or twenty times the ground of an indoor cinema with the same number of seats.

That makes this map's size scale unusually well behaved. On most HueMaps layers the largest feature is fifty times the 99th percentile and has to be capped hard; here the largest is 165,397 m², only four and a half times it, and the top of the distribution runs smoothly rather than falling off a cliff.

If you find a very large dot on the edge of a town in the United States or Australia, it is probably a drive-in.

Three features in five are a point, not a shape

60.8% of this layer has no footprint at all — the highest share of any layer in its tranche. Only 12,191 of the 31,112 features are traced.

There is a reason particular to cinemas. A modern cinema is very often a unit inside a shopping centre or a leisure complex rather than a building of its own, and a mapper marks that as a point. So the traced minority is disproportionately the standalone sites, which are the larger ones — the median traced footprint of 1,142 m² is the biggest nominal dot size in this group of layers, and that reflects which cinemas got drawn rather than how big cinemas are.

Untraced features are drawn at one nominal size, set at that median. Where a feature genuinely is traced, its size is real.

What counts here

Everything tagged `amenity=cinema`: multiplexes, independent picture houses, arthouse cinemas, drive-ins, and cinemas inside larger complexes where somebody mapped them separately.

Theatres are not here. They are `amenity=theatre` and have their own layer. The two are together on the performing arts map along with arts centres and music venues.

Film studios are not here — they are a place of work rather than a place to watch.

One technical exclusion: the selection matches the tag exactly, so a feature tagged `amenity=cinema;theatre` — a building that does both, which is common in smaller towns — is missed. Multi-value tagging of this kind is uncommon overall.

Naming

93.0% carry a name, the highest of the four kinds of venue on the performing-arts map. Cinemas are businesses with signs on them, so clicking one usually tells you something.

Mapped, not modelled

Each feature is an object a mapper drew, from survey, local knowledge or a building they walked past. Nothing here is modelled or estimated, and no distributor's or exhibitor's list has been merged in.

Size

Each symbol is sized by the footprint of the feature, in square metres measured on the globe. Symbol area is proportional to that (radius to its square root).

Among the traced features, the median footprint is 1,142 m², the 90th percentile 5,876 m² and the 99th 36,765 m².

A picture of the present

Today's map, not a history. OpenStreetMap is edited continuously; this copy is refreshed periodically. Cinemas close more often than most buildings change use, so a cinema shown here may have gone — and a closed cinema often keeps its frontage for years.

Source and licence

Back to the map