Reports from multiple movie platforms show that during this year’s “Spring Festival”, movie theaters have transcended simply being a place to watch movies, and have evolved into an important cultural carrier that carries social needs and emotional connections. As cinemas unlock more of their social potential, a new kind of cinema culture is emerging.
Data shows that during the Spring Festival period, 70.7% of movies were watched by two or more people together, setting a new high for the Spring Festival period. "Social" movie viewing is still the stable cornerstone of the Spring Festival.
Chen Jin, Data Analyst of Damai Entertainment Lighthouse Professional Edition: Watching movies together has become a hard social requirement during the Spring Festival. In terms of consumption scenarios, movie tickets have become a “universal pass” that connects multiple consumptions. The 2026 "Spring Festival" will use the "movie + cultural tourism" linkage to transform screen popularity into offline consumption momentum. For example, "Flying Life 3" was co-created with the official cultural tourism of the filming location, driving a new consumption trend of "traveling with the movie" and further strengthening the social hub function of the cinema.
Experts believe that at a time when short videos and fragmented content are prevalent, cinemas, as a place that can provide immersive collective cultural consumption, will provide audiences with a more valuable public cultural space. With the innovation of more movie viewing formats, movie theaters will release more social potential, and movie theater culture is constantly enriching everyone's lives.
Weng Yang, associate professor at Beijing Film Academy: Cinemas can create an emotional resonance effect caused by people watching movies collectively. This kind of experience is not available in fragmented or small-screen cultural consumer products. Let more theaters explore "Cinema+" scene iterations, and use the physical scene space of the theater to conduct cross-border linkage, parent-child and other activities such as markets and flash mobs, which is equivalent to the effect of a complex that integrates social interaction, consumption, and experience by going to the theater.
