Section one
Six roundtables, a survey of 274 filmgoers and a year of campaign data. Four things came out of it that we keep returning to.
Campaigns are built to produce attention and rarely to receive intention: the point at which someone stops noticing a film and starts planning to see it. Distributors are good at the first, and do it against far better funded competition for the same time and money. The sale itself belongs to an exhibitor or a ticketing platform, and little tends to get built to catch what happens before it.
Ten thousand people can watch a trailer without one of them meaning to go. Nobody checks what time a film is on unless they are thinking about going. In a year of campaign data, 44.8% of visitors arriving directly to film platforms reached a cinema. Paid traffic managed 2.2%. The difference is often whether the audience was looking, or was found.
A quarter of the filmgoers we surveyed, 35% including the unsure, now put questions to search or an assistant when deciding what to watch. Is this for me? Is it worth the trip? That is intention, spoken plainly, and the accuracy of the reply depends entirely on what happens to be findable.
The audiences who turned out, the communities that mobilised, the signals that proved reliable. Nobody manages to keep any of it by remembering. Most of what a campaign buys does not compound, and this is the part that has to be built rather than simply done.
Campaign figures throughout: calendar year 2025, across 835 releases on distributor platforms built with usheru, 22.4 million sessions. "Reached a cinema" means a visitor clicked through to a cinema’s ticketing page while showtimes were live. It is not a record of ticket sales. Full methodology in the appendix.