CNY 12.498 billion, a year-on-year increase of 4.45%; 340 million moviegoers, a year-on-year increase of 5.86%. Recently, the China Film Administration released the box office results for the 2026 summer season.
The numbers are rising, but the growth pattern has shifted. The growth rate of moviegoers outpacing the box office growth indicates that this round of expansion is driven by the scaling up of audience size rather than the increase in single-ticket prices. Meanwhile, the number of screenings reached a record high of 38.51 million, yet the average occupancy rate was only 7.21%.
However, against this backdrop, one type of cinema has shown a contrasting trend. According to data from the professional version of Dengta, during the summer season, 286 LED cinema screens (combined top five brands) generated a box office of CNY 95.85 million, with over 130,000 screenings and 2.15 million moviegoers. Placed within the CNY 12.498 billion overall market, CNY 95.85 million may not seem like much. But when these figures are broken down into four dimensions—average ticket price, occupancy rate, structural proportion, and per-screen revenue—a completely different picture emerges.
Deconstructing the CNY 95.85 Million Box Office Across Three Dimensions
A review of the data by Experts Say Display reveals that in the CNY 95.85 million box office, the top three brands, including CINITY, Huanyingdao, and VLED, accounted for a combined share of over 75%, highlighting the high concentration at the top. Looking at the total volume alone is insufficient to explain the situation. If further broken down into four dimensions—average ticket price, occupancy rate, structural proportion, and per-screen revenue—the "quality-driven pricing" characteristic of LED cinemas becomes even clearer.
■ Ticket Prices: The Overall Market is Lowering Prices, While LED Cinemas are Raising Them
The growth logic of the overall market this year is "trading price for volume," with the average ticket price at CNY 36.74, dropping to the lowest for the summer season since 2022. However, LED cinemas have followed a contrasting curve. Calculated by dividing the total box office by the total number of moviegoers, the overall average price for the 286 screens is CNY 44.5, which is 21% higher than the overall market. Among them, CINITY and Huanyingdao are priced at CNY 49.2 and CNY 46.2 respectively, which are 26% to 34% higher than the overall market.
This indicates that LED cinemas possess independent pricing power separate from the overall market. While standard cinemas are still trading price for volume, LED cinemas have already forged a path to growth without the need to lower prices.
■ Occupancy Rate: After the Price Increase, the Audience Remains
The premise for a premium to hold is audience recognition. During the summer season, the average occupancy rate of cinemas nationwide was 7.21%. The occupancy rates for mainstream LED brand cinemas were either on par with or exceeded the average across the board, with Huanyingdao ranking first at 8.31%. Despite the higher ticket prices, the occupancy rate did not drop accordingly. The audience is not without other choices; rather, they believe this experience is worth the price difference.
■ Revenue Structure: Value Stratification, with Top Brands Becoming Core Assets of Cinemas
The proportion of box office and audience contribution from LED cinemas intuitively demonstrates their positioning in cinema operations: whether they are a marginal supplementary business or a crucial revenue unit. Looking at the top five brands, both Huanyingdao and CINITY account for over 22% of the box office, with audience contributions approaching 20%, forming a stable source of revenue for their respective parent cinemas. The remaining brands have shares distributed around 15%, taking on more of a role in differentiated traffic generation, and there is a certain distance between them and the top brands.
However, the proportion is a "relative weight" that can be diluted by the size of the host cinema. A similarly popular screen placed in a small cinema with 5 halls will naturally have a higher proportion; placed in a large cinema with 15 halls, the proportion is diluted. This is like judging the strength of a chain brand: one should not look at its sales share in a particular mall, but rather at the average revenue per store. The same applies to LED brands. To see the true output level of each brand, one must look at the average box office per screen, that is, the per-hall revenue (total box office of LED halls ÷ number of LED halls), first eliminating the interference of the number of installed halls on the comparison.
Under this metric, the ranking of the two top brands has changed: CINITY is approximately CNY 508,000, and Huanyingdao is approximately CNY 400,000. However, per-hall revenue only eliminates the layer of "how many halls are installed," while the size of the hall type is still included. By reverse-calculating through the number of moviegoers, screenings, and occupancy rates, the average hall type for CINITY is about 310 seats, and for Huanyingdao, it is about 216 seats.
After further eliminating the factors of hall type and scheduling, Huanyingdao ranks first in indicators such as occupancy rate (8.31%), per-seat per-screening revenue, and per-seat annual revenue.
If the CINITY LED hall type is converted to the 216-seat scale of Huanyingdao, its per-hall revenue drops to approximately CNY 354,000, while Huanyingdao (CNY 400,000) is actually about 10.5% higher. It can be seen that Huanyingdao's second place in per-hall revenue is mainly due to its smaller hall scale; in the dimension of per-screen efficiency with hall type differences eliminated, Huanyingdao has a greater advantage.
Overall, LED cinemas have shown the characteristics of high ticket prices and high per-hall revenue, but the occupancy rate is generally only in the 7%-8% range, indicating that demand is still in the cultivation stage. In this yet-to-mature track, the stratification among brands has become clear: CINITY and Huanyingdao occupy the top positions by leveraging their respective strengths, while the remaining brands rely more on differentiated traffic generation to establish themselves.
Three Things Beyond Hardware
Combining the feedback from the summer season, the answer is not written in the number of deployed LED cinema screens or their specification sheets.
After years of industrial iteration, the gaps in hardware indicators such as contrast ratio, color gamut, and brightness for LED cinema screens are steadily narrowing. Parameters are no longer an effective yardstick to distinguish the good from the great. Hardware is merely the basic carrier for projection; it can determine whether a hall "can project," but it is increasingly difficult for it to determine whether it can "continuously sell tickets and boost occupancy." The gap has spilled over beyond hardware, concentrating on three dimensions.
■ Content Source Adaptation
The high dynamic range, high contrast, and wide color gamut of LED are natural advantages over traditional projection, but this set of advantages must be realized through exclusive mastering. If only the generic version is played, the actual viewing experience of a high-end screen will degrade into "a brighter large screen," and the hardware investment cannot be translated into the part of the experience that the audience is willing to pay extra for.
Therefore, the first differentiation in the brand echelon is not in the screen itself, but in the depth and forward-looking nature of participation in format adaptation. Whether screen characteristics are incorporated into production considerations in advance directly determines whether hardware performance can be realized on the screen.
Huanyingdao is an observable sample. On the standards side, it is bound to the Vivid domestic high-format standard; on the chain side, relying on the joint venture background of Huaxia Film, it cuts into the content source end, and promotes the application of HDR LED formats and the localization of key equipment through strategic cooperation with the China Film Science and Technology Research Institute and Huawei. The result of connecting both ends is that during this summer season, its cinemas continuously supplied high-format versions of 14 films. Additionally, China Film disclosed that the top 10 box office films of the summer season are all equipped with exclusive mastering for CINITY/CLED. The actions of top players in this link are highly consistent.
■ Exclusive Content Support
If adaptation capability solves "who makes the same film look better," content support solves "besides theatrical releases, what other tickets can this hall sell." Currently, theatrical release sources are highly homogenized, and long-term differences cannot be established through scheduling alone. The true watershed lies in whether a content supply system can be built outside the general film library, offering tickets that cannot be bought elsewhere.
As early as the 2024 summer season, what was screened in cinemas was long ago not just movies. For example, on June 25, 2025, the national launch ceremony for watching the Chinese Super League in cinemas was held at the Huaxia Film Center. This was the first time in China that a professional football match was introduced into cinemas for simultaneous live broadcasting. Afterwards, Huanyingdao incorporated the English Premier League into its normalized high-definition screening system, alongside the Chinese Super League and the WTT World Table Tennis Championships, becoming one of the fixed content categories in its sports event live broadcasting system. As of now, Huanyingdao's cases for event live broadcasting have covered multiple categories such as football, table tennis, and esports, and have developed from single-point trials to normalized operations.
In addition to live sports broadcasting, Huanyingdao has also extended to performance activities such as stand-up comedy. For instance, in August this year, Huanyingdao and Danliren Comedy launched the "Cinema Second Scene," turning the recorded content of offline stand-up comedy specials into cinema-exclusive distribution versions. The first round in September covered 50 cities and nearly 60 cinemas, and so on.
■ Cinema Operation Empowerment
The cinema operation empowerment system determines the upper limit of the commercial revenue of the cinema hall. Cinema operations naturally have a division between peak and off-peak seasons, and relying solely on film screening is difficult to revitalize the full-time value of the venue. Therefore, the more practical problem that operation empowerment needs to solve is: an LED cinema screen costs several million CNY, how can the cinema earn it back. After spending several million CNY to install the screen, cinemas often face a triple dilemma: high capital expenditures, long-term vacancy during non-peak hours, and a lack of in-house content planning and event execution capabilities.
The more common cooperation model in the industry is that equipment delivery equals project acceptance; whereas top brands regard delivery as the starting point of service. The essence of this layer is that the brand extends its capabilities beyond the equipment, helping the cinema complete the leap from "installing a screen well" to "operating a hall well."
Specifically, it falls on two things:
First, making the space reusable. Taking the upgrade of the Capital Cinema Zhonghua Store as an example, while replacing the screen, it is equipped with a professional performing arts stage and the Huanyingdao HUAN the Live multi-scene lighting solution, enabling one hall to switch between screening, performance, salon, live sports broadcasting, and business booking. The space transforms from a single-function cinema into a programmable asset.
Second, filling and selling the idle time slots for the cinema. Simply renovating the space is meaningless; the key is whether there is content to continuously fill it. During the summer season, Huanyingdao provided full-cycle marketing support throughout the season for its affiliated cinemas, with online ticket subsidies exceeding 10,000 tickets, 105 offline brand theme activities, and 18 advance screening roadshows. In September, it will also roll out the Danliren stand-up comedy "Cinema Second Scene" to 50 cities and nearly 60 cinemas, testing normalized operations with a lightweight model of CNY 25.9 ticket prices and groups of 8 people per hall.
The commonality of these actions is that they are organized by the brand and executed by the cinema, truly turning a screen from a "projection tool" into an "operating space." The cinema hall no longer relies solely on scheduling to make a living, but has the ability to undertake various cultural consumption scenarios. The source of revenue has expanded from "selling a movie ticket" to "selling the venue value of a time slot."
Experts Say Research Summary
A series of data from the 2026 summer season has drawn a clear direction for the industry's iteration.
1) The market bids farewell to the stage of simply competing in installed volume. Under the general trend of hardware homogenization, simple scale expansion cannot build long-term advantages; refined operation is the core grasp for improving quality and efficiency.
2) Content support capability is the underlying support for high-end premiums. The audience's willingness to pay for higher ticket prices stems fundamentally from the ultimate audio-visual experience brought by LED exclusive mastering. Content adaptation capability determines the value ceiling of the brand.
3) Scenario-based operation has become the key to breaking through. Diversified business formats revitalize idle venues and solve the pain point of high vacancy rates in cinemas, creating additional revenue space for cinema halls, which is the core barrier for brands to cross the cycle.
The market performance of this summer season confirms the core logic of industry iteration: the competition for LED cinema screens has completely bid farewell to the superficial comparison of single hardware parameters, shifting towards a comprehensive strength competition with hardware as the foundation, content as the core, and operation as the king. Brands such as Huanyingdao have taken the lead in exploration and are worthy of continuous attention.
The leading advantage of top brands does not lie in the subtle differences in hardware parameters, but in the systematic capability to continuously output content value to cinemas, implement operation solutions, and create operational increments. In the future track, those who can truly cross the industry cycle and continue to lead will always be the brands that can solve the real pain points of cinemas and create long-term value for the terminals.
This article is originally created by [Experts Say Display], focusing on display industry technology and market analysis, providing in-depth industry insights. Follow the official account and reply "Report" to get the entrance to the latest display industry white paper.