April 17th, 2005
Cheapest movie tickets per capita price are in India, U.S., China
ScreenDigest sent us details of its Cinema Index survey, which compares the cost of the movie ticket to average earnings around the world. Movie lovers in India, the U.S., China, Luxembourg and Ireland can rejoice, with a movie ticket costing them less than half an hour of work. In Estonia and Bulgaria, one has to put roughly two hours of work to catch a flick.
The Cinema Index is an at-a-glance way of comparing earnings with cinema prices. The lower the number in minutes, the less expensive a cinema ticket is relative to earnings power. The top two countries are very good examples of how the Index can be interpreted. While Indian net hourly earnings are relatively low (at $0.70 per hour), the average cinema ticket is also very low (at $0.19), which evens out the relatively low levels of both and results in an average of 16.6 minutes work to earn enough money to buy a cinema ticket.
At the other end of the scale, the average U.S. net hourly income is $15.20. The average ticket price is just over $6, which results in a cinema index of 23.9 minutes. China has a similar structure to India, and this results in a Cinema Index of 25.7 minutes. This augurs well for the current multiplex investment plans in China by Warner and a number of local players. Portugal and Turkey both have Cinema indexes either side of the global average (which is just under 57 minutes).
Alex is a software engineer in the San Francisco Bay Area. ITFacts is created and updated by a group of statistics-obsessed individuals.
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