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Films Watched

Map No. 345

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This map shows where people watch the most films (not including short films) at commercial screenings. Of the 7.6 billion films watched at cinemas, almost 3 billion viewings were recorded in one year in India.

In some territories it is now more popular to watch films at home. Even there many do not have access to the equipment to do this. More recent films can usually be viewed at the cinema than can be watched at home.

The most cinema visits per person were in Iceland, where the average person makes 5 trips to the cinema each year. By contrast, in Malaysia only 1 person in every 100 saw a film at the cinema in an average year.

"Currently, there are around 12,000 movie theatres in India, ranging from small ramshackle neighbourhood screening rooms to overly extravagant movie halls." Phurba Gyalzen, 2005

Territory size shows the proportion of all people seeing films in cinemas that viewed them there.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page