What Google Maps Can Tell Us About How Africans Watch Films

Google Maps is not typically thought of as a tool for film industry research. But its crowdsourced database of cinema locations across Africa — compiled from user submissions, business listings, and satellite imagery — offers a rare, granular view of exhibition infrastructure that official data sources rarely provide. By mapping what Google Maps knows and does not know about cinemas across the continent, we can begin to understand the distribution of formal exhibition infrastructure, the density of screens in urban versus rural areas, and the gaps that reveal where audiences are watching films outside of formal cinema settings.