The screens gathered in the city

I · The network that reached everywhere

A hundred units, on average, in every county

The cinema, as a statistical unit tracked by Romania's statistics office, meant more in 1990 than a neighborhood hall: it also counted the mobile cinema units, the traveling equipment that carried film from one locality to the next wherever no dedicated building existed. That is why every county averaged a hundred units in 1990 — a network that reached, at least a few times a month, into almost every locality, whether or not it had a hall of its own.

The collapse was fast. From 4,637 units in 1990, the number fell to 468 by 1997 — a nearly tenfold drop in seven years, as the economy restructured, private television arrived, and the VCR offered a screen at home. Already by 1992, just two years into the measured series, under four tenths of the original network remained: 1,771 cinemas.

In seven years, nine out of every ten Romanian cinemas closed.

II · The bottom

A minimum spread across a decade, not a year

The collapse continues, more slowly, toward a bottom that does not land in a single year: the number of cinemas hits its low in 2010, at 67 units; the number of seats, three years earlier, in 2007, at 43,057; the number of viewers, a year before the seats, in 2006, at 2,777,000 people.

2006 is the emptiest year in the whole series. For every forty-seven people who went to the cinema in 1990, only one still had somewhere to go.

III · What disappeared first

Seats fell 2.8-fold. Halls, 43-fold

Intuition says a network that thins forty-three-fold should leave behind roughly as few seats — maybe not forty-three-fold fewer, but close. That is not what happened. The number of seats fell only 2.8-fold, from 235,821 to 83,085.

The gap between the two rates says what kind of units disappeared first. The mobile cinema units and the small village halls each held only a few dozen seats; when they closed, they pulled down the count of cinemas far more than the count of seats. Average seats per cinema, 51 in 1990, had already passed 300 by 1997, before any mall in Romania carried a screen.

The climb did not stop there. The average kept rising, gradually, as the smallest halls dropped out of the count and only those with audiences large enough to justify staying open remained: 428 seats in 2002, 606 in 2007, 757 in 2010. Since then, the average has barely moved — 776 today, under twenty seats more than fourteen years ago. The multiplexes of the last decade mostly changed where people go to the movies, to the mall, in a handful of large cities; the national average hall size had already been set long before.

IV · Who still has a screen

Three counties at zero, eight at exactly one

The collapse was not spread evenly. The statistics office tracks forty counties separately, plus Bucharest — which in this series also includes the former Ilfov agricultural sector — forty-one units in total. Of these, thirty-five have at most three cinemas today, and three have reached zero: Tulcea, Giurgiu, and Olt. Eight more stopped at a single screen: Sălaj, Alba, Covasna, Brăila, Călărași, Dâmbovița, Mehedinți, and Arad.

The unit that lost the least, in relative terms, is exactly the one where the money for new halls went. Bucharest fell under fivefold, from 77 to 16 cinemas — the only place in the country with more than ten. Brăila, which started from a nearly identical number, 91, ended up with a single cinema.

V · A partial recovery

Today's viewers look like 1997's

From the 2006 bottom, the number of viewers climbed fourfold, to 11.13 million in 2024. It still sits roughly twelvefold below 1990. The pandemic left a visible mark in the middle of that recovery: viewers fell to 3.28 million in 2020 and 4.63 million in 2021, before climbing to 11.13 million in 2022, to 12.94 million in 2023 — the peak of recent years — and back down to 11.13 million in 2024.

Today's figure sits next to 1996 or 1997. A quarter century of recovery has brought the audience roughly back to where it stood right before its deepest collapse. It arrives, though, through forty-three-fold fewer screens than then.

VI · What remains

A dense network, replaced by a sparse one

Romania's 1990 cinema network was gradually replaced by another: a dense network, reaching into nearly every village, became a sparse one, concentrated where the people and the money are. The halls that remain are, on average, fifteen times larger than the ones from thirty-four years ago. Viewers have partly returned to those few, large screens. The villages and small towns did not get a cinema back.