Attendance 2008 - World Cinema Stats (3)

Yearly attendance in the world, compared to domestic population (2008) top nations
Horizontally, the red dots to the right are most populous, to the left, less populous. So dots aligned vertically have national population of similar sizes.
Vertically, the red dots to the top are largest yearly movie-going demographics, to the bottom are less movie-going. So dots aligned horizontally have movie-going demographics with similar yearly frequency.
The blue line is the worldwide median, the slope corresponding to the average ratio between movie-going demographic and total population in a given country (this average is largely influenced by the weight of India and China, so it's roughly the middle ground between these 2 giants). The blue area is the side of this limit when the movie-going public is less than world average. The lighter area is the side of the heavier movie-going public are.
We can see India and USA have a demographic that is dramatically attracted to movies. While in China (with a comparable size with India) the theatrical experience has much less penetrated the total population. First I should note this data might not be exact (I suspect this attendance to correspond to only the modern cinemas, and doesn't account for all public screenings organised in rural China). Though, the Chinese are definitely not as enthused by movies as Indians are, and the population as a whole is most certainly below the average line in any case. This might be due to the lack of infrastructures (less movies produced, not enough screens, bad exhibition circuit/marketing). But the situation is obviously different in major cities, or in Hong Kong.

Attendance in the world (2008) zoom in on smaller nations
Same as graph above, in a whole different league, as we could see in the last post. It's also the same blue line (the slope only appear to differs because of the change of axis scale to fit the picture, but it's the same).
So we can see Indonesia and Brazil are the less movie-going demographics, but also Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, The Philippines. Fewer people go to the movies, and less often. It's surprising to see Japan on this side, since it is one of the largest producer of films but could be explained by the smaller park of screens available to the population (which we'll see in a next post).
On the other side, the most active cinephile communities are France, South Korea, UK, Canada, Australia, Spain...


Yearly attendance per capita
(in 2008, 2007 or earlier when data not available)

To corroborate the observation in the previous graphs, here is the ranking of countries by their yearly admissions per capita ratio. So this time we only look at the absolute proportion of movie going population within a country, regardless for the size of this country or the volume of admissions sold. And India, USA and the EU are no longer at the top. We can note that smaller countries, even tiny ones, have a population much more into cinema than the big nations usually associated with active cinephilia. Iceland, Ireland, Singapore, New Zealand and Georgia have a remarkable ratio : over 4 admissions bought in a year for every single inhabitant (on average). Only the USA reaches this level, which is definitely the most movie-fan nation in the world, as a whole. France and South Korea are only around 3. And India is only at 2.61, which is remarkable however for a population of over 1 billion inhabitants! India could use a larger circuit of screens (as we'll see in the next post) to reach an even larger demographic. And China, as suspected, is clearly not doing enough to spread cinema throughout the land.

See:

• World Cinema Stats - index

Source :

• Focus Cannes - Marché du Film 1998-2009
  
• Compendium 2001-07
  
• Nation Master 2003
• My open source spreadsheet (Attendance per capita) PDF