How CinemaTimes works
Last updated: July 2026
Where the data comes from
Showtimes come from two places. The backbone is a licensed international showtimes feed that carries the published schedules of most cinemas in the countries we cover. On top of that we run our own collectors for venues the feed misses, mostly independent cinemas and arts centres, reading the schedules those venues publish on their own websites and box-office systems. Venue details and photographs come from the cinemas themselves and from Google Places.
How often it updates
We sync every market twice a day and rebuild the entire site from scratch on each sync, so every page you see was generated from a fresh copy of the data. In between rebuilds, your browser keeps the page honest: showtimes that have already started are hidden automatically, and the counts on the page update to match what is actually still bookable.
What it covers
CinemaTimes currently covers Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Poland, Italy, France, Germany, Belgium and Spain: around 11,000 cinemas, with more than 600,000 upcoming screenings listed at any one time across a rolling two-week window. Since June 2026 we have also kept a permanent archive of every screening we have ever recorded, which powers the Screen Barometer, our weekly statistics on what Europe's cinemas are programming (its calculation method is documented separately).
Data quality
Aggregated schedule data is messy, and we treat cleaning it as core work rather than an afterthought. Every sync runs de-duplication passes that catch the two common failure modes of upstream feeds: the same screening reappearing under a new identity, and a corrected start time leaving its stale twin behind. Each market's data volume is monitored after every sync, and a market that suddenly loses a large share of its showtimes fails our checks loudly instead of quietly publishing a thin site. We also audit film-to-showtime mappings and correct upstream mislabelling when we find it.
Limitations
Schedules ultimately belong to the cinemas, and they can change after we sync. We link every showtime to the cinema's own booking page and never sell tickets ourselves, so availability and prices are always confirmed at the cinema. A small number of venues publish no machine-readable schedule at all and are missing until we build a collector for them. We show what cinemas program, not attendance: we hold no box-office, ticketing or seating data.
Corrections
If you spot a wrong time, a missing cinema, or a film mapped to the wrong page, email [email protected]. Reports go straight to the person who can fix them. More about who runs the site is on the about page.