Cinemagoers called on to rank their city's 'cinemability'

Deakin University researchers are calling on cinema lovers around the world to rank their city's "cinemability" based on the features they see as important.

The rankings people choose will be used by the researchers to refine the index and add to understanding about what factors go into making a city the best cinema city in the world.

The Cinema Cities Index is just one of a number projects being carried out by the Kinomatics team which uses big data to take an overarching look at the creative industries, including film and music.

Project leader, Chair and Professor of Media and Communication at Deakin University, Professor Deb Verhoeven said the Cinema Cities Index is currently based around five main concepts for measuring cinemability.

"Specifically we look at access to venues including the diversity of venues films are shown in, the variety of films on offer, the volume of screenings, whether the cities host film festivals or not and the cost of going to the pictures," she said.

Professor Verhoeven said the index pulled together data from 311 cities from 48 countries.

"In 2013 Los Angeles was the top ranking city followed by Paris, New York, Chicago, and London," she said.

"Melbourne is ranked 16th, Sydney 37th, Brisbane 62nd, Adelaide 82nd and Perth is 100."

Professor Verhoeven said the beauty of the index was that all the data used by the researchers was available to cinemagoers to create their own rankings.

"So while we ranked the cities around the world according to our sense of how the ten criteria should be weighted, cinemagoers might choose different weightings based on what they see is important," she said.

"Affordability might be important to you, or whether a city has lots of multiplexes or film festivals.

"For instance when we looked globally at the price of cinema tickets relative to GDP, Australia's most affordable city for seeing movies is Brisbane (ranked 31st in the world) with most other Australian cities hovering around the mid-50s (Melbourne, 52; Adelaide, 53; Perth, 54; Sydney, 55)."

"What is also interesting about the results is how diverse the top twenty are with cities from North America, Europe, Asia, Australasia, South America, and the Middle East. And not just global cities but cities of all sizes seem to feature."

The research has been supported by the Australian Research Council.

Check out the index here