Cinemas — how this layer is made

What you are looking at

Each dot is a cinema. There are more than 30,000 worldwide. There is only one colour, and the size of a dot represents the footprint of the building. Click on any of them to see what OpenStreetMap records, such as who runs it and its website. If there's a Wikipedia article, we show a short summary and a link to the full article, in your own language where possible.

Where the data comes from

Every cinema here is something a mapper added at the OpenStreetMap website, from a survey, from local knowledge or from a frontage they walked past. We don't model or estimate anything ourselves, and we haven't merged in any distributor's or exhibitor's list.

What we include

We use one exact tag, `amenity=cinema`. That takes in multiplexes, independent picture houses, arthouse cinemas, drive-ins, and screens inside a larger complex where somebody mapped them separately. Film studios are not here, because a studio is a place of work rather than a place to watch. Theatres carry `amenity=theatre` and have a layer of their own. Because we match the tag exactly, a building tagged as a cinema and a theatre together is missed, and in smaller towns one building often does both.

Colour

There is one colour, and that is a decision rather than something we forgot. The useful division would be a multiplex against a single-screen picture house. OpenStreetMap has a tag for the number of screens, and far too few cinemas record it to colour a map by. Tags such as `cinema:3D` describe what a showing is like rather than what the place is, so we don't use those either. Size represents the building instead, and a multiplex covers many times the ground of a village cinema, so the difference shows without our claiming a number nobody wrote down.

The biggest dots are drive-ins

At the top of the size range are drive-in cinemas, and unlike most oversized features 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 seating the same audience. The largest covers more than 150,000 m². A very large dot on the edge of a town in the United States or Australia is usually one of these rather than a picture house.

Size

The size of a dot represents the footprint of the cinema in square metres. About three cinemas in five have no outline at all, and we draw those at one nominal size, so for most of this map the size is not telling you how large the cinema is. 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. The cinemas that do have an outline are therefore mostly the standalone sites, which are the larger ones, so the typical traced footprint of about 1,100 m² reflects which cinemas got drawn rather than how big cinemas are.

Where the map is empty

An empty area means nobody has mapped a cinema there, not that a place has nowhere to watch a film. Cinemas are mapped more evenly around the world than most cultural things, because a cinema is a commercial building that exists wherever there is an audience. Coverage is still thinner across much of Africa and central Asia, and single-screen cinemas are mapped less completely than multiplexes almost everywhere.

Up to date, mostly

OpenStreetMap is edited continuously, and we take a new copy once every one to three months. 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

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