Access to Cinema

The cinema infrastructure and activity in Romania

Updated on 24/10/2023

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Distribution of cinema theatres

at the level of territorial administrative unit

According to the analysis, at territorial level, in 2022:

  • in five counties [Giurgiu, Ilfov, Olt, Sălaj, Tulcea] there were no active cinema theatres;
  • in the urban environment, 65 cinemas were located in county capital cities (70% of the total number of active cinema theatres);
  • in rural areas, the cinema theatre infrastructure is absent.

Classification of territorial administrative units depending on the cinema infrastructure

Classification of cinemas depending on the type of locality

The following graph shows the distribution of cinemas, depending on to the type of locality in which they are located, according to the relationship between two variables: the number of seats (vertical axis) and the number of spectators recorded in the reference year (horizontal axis).

Regardless of the region, the best performing cinemas, both in terms of capacity (number of seats) and the number of spectators recorded in the reference year, are found in the regional economic centres. The largest cinema in the country is Cinema City Cotroceni Bucharest, and the smallest one is Cinema Călimani-Toplița in Harghita county.

Cinemas are classified depending on the type of locality in which they operate (grouped into categories by color) and the number of seats (variation in the size of the circles). The visualization allows information to be filtered by development region.

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Population’s access to the cinema infrastructure

In 2022, at national level, 63% of the population did not have access to cinema infrastructure in their residence locality:

  • Of the total population without access to a cinema in their locality, 30% come from urban areas and 70% from rural areas, where there is no cinema infrastructure.
  • Even if there are no active cinemas in the residence locality, there is accessible cinema infrastructure at the county level, mainly in the county capital cities.
  • There are, however, 5 counties [Giurgiu, Ilfov, Olt, Sălaj, Tulcea] where the population does not have access to a cinema at all, regardless of the place of residence.
  • The low access of the population to the cinema infrastructure in the place of residence contributes to the low frequency of going to the cinema. According to the Cultural Consumption Barometer (2019), going to the cinema, as a leisure activity, is absent for most Romanians. At national level, approximately 66% of respondents mentioned that they have never attended a cinema in the last year and only 25% attended once or several times in the last year (Sandu & Oană, 2019, 31).

In order to determine the degree of access, we used the POP107A indicator, the population by residence on January 1st  depending on development regions and counties. The percentage of the population with and without access to the cinema resulted from the ratio between the population of the localities where there are active cinemas and the total population of the respective county in 2022.

Populationʼs access to cinema

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Spectators by country of origin of the broadcast movies

This section presents the dynamic evolution of the total number of spectators depending on the country of origin of the movies broadcast in the period 2010-2022. The popularity of American movies among the Romanian audience has not changed in the last 12 years, the number of spectators of these movies having the largest share of the total spectators in the period 2010-2022. European movies occupy the second position throughout the entire analysed period among audience preferences, reaching the maximum value (10%) in 2017. However, in 2022 the number of spectators of Romanian movies surpassed the number of European movies in 2022, with 17 % of the total number of spectators that year.

Temporal evolution of the number of spectators depending on the country of origin of the films broadcast

Percentage of spectators by country of origin of the films broadcast