Recent research by the United Nations Information Centres (UNIC) and the British Film Festival (BFI) has quantified something the cinema-going community has long believed: That cinemas are more than mere places of entertainment. Instead, the role they play in society creates something rather special. That they’re an underappreciated but indispensable, community asset.

Social sway

Now, it’s always been known that this is true of art-house cinemas in trendy city sectors because it’s easy to see how they fit into those communities’ tightly defined cultural ecosystems. But can we really credit the local multiplex with the same social sway? It seems we can.

It’s worth reading BFI and UNIC have to say in full because they show, in well-researched detail, how cinemas have both innovated to meet new challenges and yet remained a fixed and reliable space in a swirl of change.

It’s that continuity that’s important to community. While restaurants come and go, fashion chains are fashionably short-lived, and online shopping has hollowed out retail’s role, cinema represents valued stability despite its ups and downs. The BFI study shows that users across all types of cinemas would pay an annual donation of EUR€22.07 (USD$14.56) just to prevent their local cinema from being repurposed for any other function. Moreover, a majority (63%) said just having a cinema gave them a sense of local pride — rising to 70% when that venue also had a social hub like a cafe or bar.

A spending ripple

If audiences instinctively value cinema as a uniquely safe space to experience reliably world-class entertainment at a fixed price, they also know how rare that is, and how much poorer their community would be without it. And thanks to these reports, we now know how much poorer.

The reports found cinemas brought wider value to the community of EUR€689,700 (USD$767,415.40) per cinema per year on top of the value created by the average cinema through ticket and related sales. That’s EUR€689,700 even before you factor in visits to local shops, cafes, restaurants, and bars. Cinemas are the epicenter of a spending ripple that happens dozens of times daily around each screening.

With all that local spending comes local employment. UNIC reports that close to 100,000 people are directly employed in cinemas in France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and the UK.

And maybe that’s another difference between cinema and streaming: Cinemas are simultaneously local and global. Yes, they show us the latest, greatest, worldwide hit in laser-powered star-studded glory, but they employ our friends and neighbors when they do. Much of the value they create in the community stays in the community. That’s unique for a mass medium and rarely part of any online business plan.

Consumers of all content, media, and leisure

As the UNIC report makes clear, local cinemas occupy a space between art and media, and today’s cinemagoers are enthusiastic consumers of all content, media, and leisure. It’s worth directly quoting the report when it says, “72% of cinemagoers are gamers, compared to the 51% of non-cinemagoers that are gamers. For transactional Video On Demand (TVOD), cinemagoers are twice as likely to engage with buying content on VOD than non-cinemagoers (53% compared to 27%). As for the recent move to free-ad supported streaming TV (FAST) channels, 42% of cinemagoers use them compared to 27% of non- cinemagoers. Cinemagoers are also avid sports lovers, with 64% stating they are fans compared to only 37% of non-cinemagoers.

There’s nothing old-fashioned about going to the movies. This isn’t yesterday’s medium, it’s a vibrant part of the communities we all crave.