THE SITUATION: Screen Numbers
Tracking the trends, tensions, and opportunities in Australian cinema exhibition.
The Australian Screen Situation is a breakdown of what’s really happening in Australian cinema exhibition — the data, the decisions, and the realities shaping which films make it to our screens. This series aims to connect the dots between filmmakers, exhibitors, distributors, and audiences to reveal how the system works.
Understanding is the first step to improving — for filmmakers, for exhibitors, for distributors, for audiences, and for the stories we share. Because stories on screen have cultural value as well as economic value.
In case you haven’t worked it out yet — I love cinema. Seriously. Cinema forever (and ever and ever). I don’t buy into the doom-and-gloom takes about “the death of the movies.”
My analogy is simple: watching screen stories is like eating.
Sometimes you stop by the supermarket and grab a pre-packaged processed snack (lets call this one AISlop).
Sometimes you cook at home (LoFi social media, low produced shorts).
Sometimes you grab something fast and reliably consistent (Reality TV and maybe what previously would have been called soapies).
Sometimes it’s your family-owned local spot (lower-budget TV dramas).
Sometimes you splurge on a fancier special-occasion place (Premium TV, TV Movies).
And sometimes, when you want something crafted, intentional, and unforgettable that’s when you’d go to the Michelin-star restaurant (a cinema movie).
People will always need to eat and it’s very rare to meet a person that doesn’t watch ANYTHING.
And thankfully, going to the movies is still a lot cheaper than a Michelin-star meal. I’ll get to pricing another week — that’s its own Situation.
For now, each edition of The Australian Screen Situation will follow the same structure as we map the realities of Australian cinema exhibition.
This first chapter starts at the foundation: the screens themselves. How many exist, where they are, and what that means for filmmakers and audiences.
A DEFINITION
When I say cinema, I don’t just mean a screen that you could watch anywhere. I mean:
a screen larger than anything most of us can fit in our homes
specialist sound systems designed for storytelling, not convenience
a third space, not home or work, where we gather intentionally, generally with strangers.
Cinema is a communal experience. You sit in the dark with strangers and agree, for a set amount of time, to give a story your full attention. You can’t pause it. You can’t scroll. You can’t half-watch. You can leave if you don’t like it but that willingness to commit changes how stories land.
It’s fundamentally different from home viewing. Watching alone or at home has value — just like cooking for yourself does. But it’s not the same as a shared, intentional, public experience.
Cinema also carries cultural weight. What plays on cinema screens signals what a society believes is worth gathering for. It’s a form of cultural validation — not just for films, but for the audiences invited to see themselves reflected there and open our eyes to world we may not have acess to.
Cinemas are economic drivers in our industry - films that go into cinema’s tend to perform better on streaming platforms. They are also an employer of (mostly young) people, some in their very first jobs.
That’s why definitions matter in this series. If we treat cinema as interchangeable with home viewing, it becomes easier to dismiss, underinvest in, or quietly replace.
Cinemas are cultural, democratic, collective, economic, temporal and intentional.
If we’re serious about the future of Australian films in cinemas, we need to be clear about what cinema actually is — and why it still matters.
THE SITUATION
According to the Australian Cinema Association, Australia currently has 456 cinema locations and 2244 screens nationwide. That’s the headline figure that seems impressive, but as soon as you try to understand what those 2244 screens actually represent for filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, and audiences, you immediately run into a problem.
Very little of this information is accessible, searchable, or standardised.
So I’ve started building a Public Google Sheet that lists every screen in the country from the data I can gather, broken down by chain, location, format, capacity, accessibility features, and more. Anyone can contribute. The goal is simple: create a transparent baseline that the entire industry can reference.
This is the first step in understanding how Australian films move — or struggle to move — through our own exhibition system.
THE REALITY
Beyond those top-level industry numbers as a filmmaker, it’s extremely difficult to find verified, granular detail.
So the spreadsheet begins with what can be captured and verified:
The wonderful team at Numero has saved me hours and hours of work with a simple data dump that I’ve started sifting through. On the ‘ABOUT THIS SHEET’ tab you’ll see eventually all the data I’d like to get in there.
This is an important first step in understanding the landscape and what we are dealing with and a deliberately practical starting point: an open, collaborative dataset that anyone can build on.
You can see there’s still quite a bit of work to do. Please feel free to add your name to the contributors and chip in!
LINK TO: CENTRAL EXHIBITION TRACKER
FOUR PERSPECTIVES
Filmmaker
The big dream of most filmmakers in the past has been to have their film show in cinemas. That’s changing. I think a lot of newer filmmakers are smartly recognising how challenging that achievement is.
If you are making a film in Australia you can’t meaningfully plan what a successful release looks like if you don’t have an understanding of the landscape.
Without clear data, audience strategy becomes guesswork. You can’t meaningfully plan a release, target regional communities, understand limits to releases and screen competition or push for more ambitious screen allocations if you don’t know where the screens actually are or what kind they are. Having this baseline data turns distribution from guesswork into a strategic conversation.
I also started this whole series from attending the opening of our local SCREENX cinemas (at Event Innaloo). Releasing a film in ScreenX or IMax or 4D is incredibly expensive, so if filmmakers can’t achieve a level of success in the normal screens how can we ever reach the heights of an IMAX /70MM film creation.
Distributor
Distributors very likely have this information - but if you wanted to start a new distribution company this is information you would need. Accurate screen and venue information improves forecasting, helps match titles to the right houses, and strengthens conversations with exhibitors. It also opens doors for smaller distributors who don’t have the internal resources of the majors.
Additionally if you were going to be crazy enough to self distribute - this data will be invaluable.
Exhibitor
For exhibitors — especially independents — shared visibility highlights strengths and gaps across the country. It shows where regional audiences are underserved, where premium formats dominate, and where there may be room for partnerships or localised programming. Transparency isn’t a threat to cinemas; it’s a tool for smarter engagement and better community service. Running a cinema is an icredibly expensive exercise. The rent, projectors, staff, maintance, stock and power costs are A LOT! And as we move down the flywheel of cinema distribution you’ll see how a lot of these factors come in to what movies show and when.
Audience
Audiences are already navigating inconsistent, scattered information. Accessibility features, screen formats, and even basic session details vary wildly in clarity. A national dataset empowers communities — especially disabled audiences, regional viewers, and families — to make informed choices. It makes cinema-going more inclusive and helps people discover what’s actually available to them. This data starts to exsist already in websites like flicks and is more audience friendly where you can just search by location.
THE FRICTION POINTS
This process has already shown me one of the most revealing findings so far: we lack a clear, comparable data baseline that is accessible for filmmakers. I’m shocked that the Australian Cinema Association doesn’t have this information accessible. It was absolutly a piece of information I thought they would and should have.
Here are a few early observations I have as a filmmaker and questions that I’ll start digging into:
On the surface, 2244 screens sounds like a lot — but what does that mean relative to other countries with similar population size or geographic spread?
How does Australia compare to Canada, New Zealand, Ireland, or Scandinavian nations in screens per million people?
Are we under-scaled relative to cultural output and cinema attendance?
Understanding this will help contextualise whether venue accessibility is fundamentally constrained or simply unevenly distributed.
The raw numbers don’t tell us how screens are spread across the country. We know there are major cinema hubs in the capital cities, but:
How thinly are screens spread in outlying and regional towns?
Are entire regions effectively “screen deserts” for theatrical premieres?
These questions tie directly to audience access and cultural inclusion and might be more challenging to map.
Screens aren’t all created equal. A cinema with five screens that includes a premium format (IMAX, ScreenX, 4DX) represents a very different offering than a five-screen regional house with only standard projection.
How many premium screens exist, and where?
Are these formats concentrated in metropolitan areas only?
What does this mean for the opportunities Australian films actually have to show in premium venues? (or as I started the announcement of this series with - making content for those screens).
I’ve started dropping in the types of screens. Noting that some of them are mixed use venues - not specifically cinemas.
The simple fact that this dataset needed to be crowdsourced highlights a transparency gap.
Why isn’t there a central, regularly updated public registry?
What will happen when we start layering programming, session counts, and showtimes onto this base and start seeing how Australian films are supported by Australian Cinemas.
These aren’t “problems” we can fix today — but they are structural questions that point to where the next phase of analysis should go.
THE OPPURTUNITY
If every part of the exhibition ecosystem has rational reasons to keep things as they are, then meaningful change won’t come from calling anyone out and the opportunity isn’t full exposure of commercially sensitive information. It’s shared, structural visibility at the infrastructure level, where the benefits outweigh the risks.
For Filmmakers
When filmmakers can see where screens are, what formats exist, and how access differs across the country, we can assist in planning releases strategically rather than aspirationally. This doesn’t guarantee success but it replaces hope with agency and strategy.
For Distributors
Shared data improves efficiency. A common baseline reduces duplicated labour, strengthens forecasting, and makes the distributor’s value clearer not as a gatekeeper of hidden knowledge, but as a strategic partner who can interpret visible systems and optimise outcomes.
For Exhibitors
Visibility can attract partnership, not punishment. Clear information about formats, accessibility, and location helps distributors and filmmakers bring the right films to the right venues. It opens doors to targeted programming, community engagement, and policy support especially for independents and regional cinemas.
For Audiences
Clarity creates demand. When audiences can see what’s available (and what’s missing) expectations change. Choice expands. Discovery improves. And cinemas become places of active cultural engagement, not passive consumption.
As I go through this process of bringing all the data together I hope that I’d be able to anticipate what success from my films might be. Where it might be best to spend marketing money and challenge the structures the exist in hoping for just a little change that might help us succeed.
This isn’t a call to action — not yet. This first piece is about mapping, not fixing. Before we can talk about policy, incentives, or reform, we need a shared understanding of the physical reality of cinema exhibition in Australia. What exists. Where it is.