Our Cinema: Top Ten and Counting, but with Caveats

A recent analysis of Welsh cinemas places us among the best, but a closer examination of the data reveals significant limitations in the ranking approach.

Saturday, 28th June 2025

Our cinema, Richard Booth’s Bookshop Cinema, has ranked among the top ten cinemas in Wales, according to a recent analysis of TripAdvisor reviews for British cinemas, but there are questions about the design of the study.

TripAdvisor reviews for 32 cinemas across Wales were analysed by the London-based production company Wonderpunch. Wonderpunch concluded from their analysis that cinema-goers consistently favour independent cinemas over the big names (e.g. ODEON, Vue and Cineworld, which all ranked at or near the bottom). The conclusion, which has been reported by Nation Cymru, was certainly pleasing to hear.

The analysis of the TripAdvisor reviews used Bayesian ratings. In this case, 20 fake three-star reviews were added to each cinema to normalise the scores between cinemas with lots of reviews and cinemas with few. Naturally, cinemas with more reviews were less impacted by the normalising effect, while cinemas with fewer reviews were significantly impacted. But are TripAdvisor reviews alone an accurate measure of the popularity of a cinema?

In our case, the TripAdvisor page for our cinema is tied into the page for our bookshop; you can’t leave a review for one without leaving a review for the other. As of 28th June 2025, the average rating was 4.5 stars across 117 reviews for the Bookshop and the Cinema together on TripAdvisor. As a result, our normalised average rating was 4.28. Therefore, the analysis assumed that a review for the Bookshop counted as a review for the Cinema, a significant flaw in the methodology.

If you visit our cinema’s page on Google Maps, you’ll notice that we have an average rating of 4.8 stars across 81 reviews. Had the analysis used Google Maps rather than TripAdvisor reviews, the normalised average score for our cinema would have been approximately 4.44 stars. Assuming that the relative rankings of the other cinemas remained the same, then Richard Booth’s Bookshop Cinema would have placed 4th, rather than 7th.

Furthermore, the UK and Ireland Cinema Landscape databank of the Film Distributors’ Association reveals that there are 62 cinemas in Wales, which suggests that only 52% of cinemas in Wales were included in the rankings. Brecon Coliseum, another well-known independent cinema in the area dating back to 1925, didn’t appear in the rankings because it doesn’t have a TripAdvisor page. Nevertheless, it has an average rating of 4.6 stars across 137 reviews. Its normalised average rating would have been approximately 4.40 if it had been included.

The difference between Google Maps and TripAdvisor reviews is quite stark for some cinemas. To play devil’s advocate for a moment, purely for the sake of fairness, the Vue Cinema in Carmarthen, which ranked as the worst cinema in Wales according to Wonderpunch’s analysis, had significantly different reviews between its Google Maps and TripAdvisor pages, going from 2.4 stars across 125 reviews on TripAdvisor to 3.9 stars across 1,055 reviews on Google Maps.

The conclusion of the analysis, which reinforces the consumer trend towards independent cinemas, is noble. We strongly believe that independent cinemas offer a superior experience to the larger companies, but there needs to be a more robust analysis to show it.