- Cinema remains a high-impact advertising medium post-Covid
- South African cinema reach requires multi-circuit buying
- Cinema audiences are young, digital, and hard to reach elsewhere
- Cinema delivers unmatched attention and ad effectiveness
- Cinema complements digital by driving incremental reach and brand equity
Cinema has always had more lives than its critics would like to admit. Post-Covid, the medium was written off. Exhibitors were bleeding. Studios were hedging toward streaming. The narrative was simple: cinema is dying.
Then Top Gun: Maverick happened. Tom Cruise, a legacy IP, and a story that demanded a big screen collectively dragged audiences back into darkened rooms worldwide and reminded everyone in media what cinema actually is. Not a relic. A force.
I’ve heard the objections many times. “I went to the movies last week and there were only two other people in the cinema.” Fair enough. But here’s the thing – you don’t buy cinema based on a single screen, just as you don’t buy TV based on two people sitting in a lounge.
Television is evaluated on cumulative reach across its entire universe of viewers. Cinema works exactly the same way. You are buying a guaranteed, aggregated audience across every screen, every session, every week of your campaign. The optics of a quiet Tuesday evening matinee are irrelevant to the strategic conversation.
The market is bigger than one circuit
This is where most conversations about cinema fall short. The debate tends to default to Ster Kinekor because it has the most visible data, but the South African cinema market is a two-player story – and the split is closer than most planners realise.
In 2025, Ster Kinekor delivered 3 096 278 admissions. The combined NU Metro, Movies@ and Independent circuit delivered 2 962 629. Together, that is just over six million admissions across the year – a 51/49 market split that is as close to parity as any medium gets. If you are only buying one circuit, you are leaving half the cinema audience on the table. True national cinema reach requires both.
Ster Kinekor attendance peaked in January at 406 513, driven by the post-festive season carryover, with further peaks in April, May and July aligned to school holiday cycles and blockbuster releases. The trough months – March, September and October – reflect periods between major content releases rather than any structural audience decline.
The NU Metro/Movies@/Independent group mirrors this pattern, with their strongest quarterly performance in Q2 at 391 829 admissions, reinforcing that holiday and content-driven spikes are a market-wide phenomenon, not circuit-specific.
The audience is not who you think it is
The cinema-goer profile has changed dramatically, and this is the strongest argument for the medium in a modern media plan. According to GWI’s data on the Cinema Goer segment, these audiences skew heavily toward Gen Z and Millennials – precisely the cohorts that have become the hardest to reach through traditional linear television.
Seven in ten cinemagoers paid for some form of digital content in the month prior, and they spend significantly above-average time on social networks and messaging platforms. These are digitally fluid, high-engagement consumers.
They haven’t abandoned screen culture – they’ve upgraded their expectations of it.And while their TV viewing isn’t necessarily lower in absolute terms, research from Deloitte supports what planners are seeing on the ground: younger consumers are increasingly sgravitating toward social video and live streaming over scheduled linear formats.
Cinemagoers are already living in that world. They are less dependent on the TV schedule and more intentional about the content they choose. Which means when they choose cinema, that choice carries weight.
The attention no other medium can match
This is the argument that should end every media planning debate about cinema. Lumen Research – the gold standard in attention measurement – consistently shows cinema delivering the highest attention scores of any advertising medium. No second screen. No scrolling. No skip button. Just a captive audience, in the dark, glued to a 20-metre screen with the sound turned up.
In an era where every other medium is fighting fragmentation, multitasking, and declining dwell time, cinema offers something genuinely scarce: undivided human attention. For brand-building, for emotional impact, for lodging a message deep in memory – that environment is irreplaceable.
Cinema versus digital: it’s not an either/or
Here is a conversation that happens in every planning session at some point. The client looks at the budget and asks: why not take that R500k cinema allocation and boost my TikTok and Meta spend instead? Better targeting, better measurability, better value – or so the argument goes.
It sounds rational. It isn’t. When a brand is already active on TikTok and Meta, adding more budget to those platforms doesn’t buy a new audience – it buys more frequency against the same audience already being reached. The algorithm finds the people it knows. You get deeper penetration into a narrow pool, not broader reach into new territory. At some point that additional spend isn’t growing your brand — it’s just irritating the same person for the fifth time that week.
Diminishing returns on digital are real, they’re measurable, and they arrive faster than most clients expect. Cinema breaks that loop entirely. It is an additive reach channel. You are going somewhere else – physically and psychologically – to find people that your digital campaign either hasn’t reached or hasn’t reached in a way that actually registers.
But the more powerful argument isn’t about reach. It’s about frame of mind. On TikTok and Meta, your ad interrupts someone who is scrolling, multitasking, and actively conditioned to skip. The platform is built for speed and friction avoidance.
Your message has to fight the context it lives in. Cinema inverts that completely. The audience has made a deliberate, paid, social decision to be present. They have put their phone away. They are emotionally primed – leaning into a story, in a dark room, with the volume up. An impression in that environment is qualitatively different from an impression served between two TikTok dances.
There is a concept in behavioural economics called context congruence – the idea that messages received in high-engagement, emotionally resonant environments transfer more effectively into memory and brand association. Cinema is arguably the highest context- congruent advertising environment that exists in media today. Lumen’s attention data proves it empirically, but any planner with common sense can feel the logic.
The value argument needs reframing
“Better value” on digital is a CPM conversation. But CPM measures the cost of an exposure, not the cost of an impression that actually registers in a human brain. When you apply an attention-adjusted CPM lens – which Lumen’s research makes possible – cinema’s apparent cost disadvantage narrows significantly or disappears entirely. You are paying for eyeballs on digital. On cinema, you are paying for minds.
The smarter framing for any client conversation is this: TikTok and Meta convert and activate. Cinema builds the brand equity that makes those conversion channels work harder over time. Cutting cinema to fund more digital is often a short-term efficiency trade that quietly erodes long-term brand strength – and that erosion only shows up in the data 18 months later when conversion rates start softening and nobody can explain why.
The two channels are not competing. They are sequencing. And a plan that uses both – cinema for deep brand-building, digital for activation and conversion — is structurally stronger than one that doubles down on digital alone.
The growth trajectory is real
The PwC Africa Entertainment & Media Outlook makes the long-term case definitively. Of all media segments tracked over the 2022–2027 forecast period, cinema carries the second highest projected CAGR at 11% – behind only OTT.
South Africa’s total E&M market is on a trajectory from R176.7 billion in 2022 to R231.2 billion by 2027, and cinema is one of the fastest-growing segments in that mix. That is not the growth profile of a dying medium. That is the profile of a medium finding its second wind.
The 2026 content slate accelerates this further. The Mandalorian & Grogu, Toy Story 5, Devil Wears Prada 2, Moana live-action, and a string of strong releases point to an attendance recovery that media planners should be positioning around now – before the inventory conversation becomes more expensive.
The martini principle
Cinema is like a vodka martini not for every client or campaign. But for brands that need emotional resonance, attention that converts to memory, and access to an audience that has largely migrated away from linear TV — it deserves a serious seat at the table.
Six million South Africans walked into a cinema in 2025. They switched their phones off, sat down, and paid attention. In what other medium can you say the same?
With cinema you get your vodka martini shaken, not stirred and served with an olive. The brief deserves more than a casual pour.
Colin Ramparsadh is business unit head at The MediaShop.
Sources: Cinevation/Ster Kinekor Cinema Trend Presentation 2026; GWI Cinema Goer segment data; Lumen Research attention studies; Deloitte Digital Media Trends; PwC Africa Entertainment & Media Outlook 2023-2027.
