Cinemas closing movie theatres around South Africa

South Africa’s two biggest cinema chains have closed roughly a third of their movie theatres in the past decade, an analysis by MyBroadband shows.

On a global level, cinemas have experienced declining ticket sales, largely due to the rising adoption of on-demand video streaming services.

The pandemic lockdowns in 2020, which forced people to spend more time at home and closed cinemas in many countries, were a particularly heavy blow.

Annual cinema attendance figures picked up after the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021, 2022, and 2023, but crashed by 8.8% in 2024.

According to the European Audiovisual Observatory, 500 million fewer tickets were sold last year than in 2023. Last year’s cinema attendance figures were also only 68% of 2019.

The long-term decline is evident when looking at the highest-grossing movies at the box office a decade ago.

In 2015, the highest-grossing movies around the world were Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens, Jurassic World, Furious 7, Avengers: Age of Ultron, and Minions.

All five movies exceeded $1 billion in ticket sales globally, with the Star Wars instalment topping the year’s box office at roughly $2.07 billion. Collectively, they generated around $7.81 billion.

In 2024, the five top-grossing movies were Inside Out 2, Deadpool & Wolverine, Moana 2, Despicable Me 4, and Wicked.

Only the first three generated over $1 billion each, with Inside Out 2’s $1.7 billion being the best.

The five top-grossing movies last year generated about $5.82 billion, 25% less than 2015’s top five. The picture is even worse considering ticket prices have increased over the past decade.

While there is limited information on the impact the decline is having on movie theatre viability globally, the local effect is clear.

Local theatres bleeding

In 2015, Ster-Kinekor and Nu-Metro had 76 cinema complexes in South Africa. A decade later, the number had declined to 52. It will be dropping to 51 in less than a week.

According to a report from inQuba, Ster-Kinekor had 55 cinemaplexes and 400 screens in South Africa in 2015.

Only 35 remained at the time of publication. This will decline to 34 on 12 June 2025, when Ster-Kinekor closes its third movie theatre this year at Cavendish Square in Cape Town.

That means the company will have 21 fewer cinemas than in 2015, a decline of roughly 38% over a decade.

At one point in the past few years, Ster-Kinekor also had six movie theatres in other African countries. That has been reduced to just two sites in Namibia.

Finding the number of cinemas Nu Metro operated a decade ago was more difficult. After Times Media Group sold the cinema chain in early 2014, the company operated 17 movie theatres.

It opened its first two Scene Xtreme cinemas in late 2014, and another followed in July 2015. In August 2015, the Trade Route Mall in Lenasia also got a six-screen cinema, including a fourth Scene Xtreme.

Therefore, by late 2015, the company had about 21 cinemas. As of May 2025, Nu Metro has 16 cinemas. It will add one to this count soon after taking over Ster-Kinekor’s Gateway site.

That means Nu Metro will have seen a net reduction of four sites over the past decade. While this seems a far better figure than Ster-Kinekor’s, losing a fifth of its locations is no small thing.

Overall, the reduction of 25 cinemas works out to a loss of 33% of movie theatres. There are only a handful of cinemas operated by smaller and independent players.

The table below compares how many cinemas Ster-Kinekor and Nu-Metro had in 2015 and 2025.