What cinema websites actually run on

Most cinemas do not own their mobile channel. Only 7% of sites link to an app, which means the phone — where most tickets are bought — is served by a mobile website or a marketplace. That is the gap native cinema apps exist to close.

Almost nobody tells Google their showtimes. Only 4% of sites mark up screenings with structured data, which is the markup search engines use to show times directly in results. It is free to fix: our movie schema generator writes it, and getting your showtimes on Google explains the rest.

The ticketing market is national. The leading system in Germany barely appears in the UK, and the UK's leaders barely appear in the US. If you are comparing systems, compare the ones with a real installed base in your country — our cinema ticketing software comparison covers 21 of them.

We took every cinema in Wikidata with an official website, removed social media and dead links, and visited the rest on 24 September 2026 with an identified crawler that respects robots.txt. A site counted as an active cinema only if it published showtimes or linked to a known cinema ticketing system — 1,189 did. On each we read the homepage and, where no ticketing link appeared there, up to two showtime pages, and recorded links to known booking domains, app store links, analytics tags and structured data. Only aggregate figures are published; no cinema is named.

The limits matter. Wikidata over-represents independent, historic and European cinemas and under-represents large chains, which appear once each. We detect a system only when a site links to its domain, so white-labelled booking on the cinema's own domain is missed and counted as none. And several national marketplaces are not fingerprinted. We will repeat the crawl and add sources over time.

Using these figures

Quote them, chart them, put them in a deck or a board paper. No permission needed and no attribution required, though a link back to this page is appreciated and lets a reader check the working.

If a figure here looks wrong to you, it might be: sources in this industry revise, and some of them disagree with each other by more than you would expect. Tell us what you are seeing and we will correct the page and say that we did.