Oligopoly

A market with few enough sellers that each one’s decisions set the terms for everybody buying. Philippine cinema exhibition is the textbook case: a handful of chains, and every major one of them the cinema arm of a property conglomerate.

The consequence is not that these companies are hostile to Filipino films. It is that a cinema is assessed the way any other tenant is assessed, on revenue per square metre, which is a completely reasonable thing for a property company to do and is fatal for a title that opens softly. A film that underperforms on its first day can lose its screens within days, and no appeal to cultural value is being heard, because nobody in that decision is being paid to hear one. For an independent producer without a distribution arm, entry to those screens runs through somebody else’s distributor, on terms described by the people offering them as goodwill.

Source: The chain-by-owner table, drawn from the exhibitor directory used for block screenings, is in section 11 of the Cinema research map: SM Cinema (SM Prime), Ayala Malls Cinemas (Ayala Land), Robinsons Movieworld (Robinsons Land), Megaworld, Vista, Gateway (Araneta), Power Plant (Rockwell), Greenhills (Ortigas), Fisher. Market context and the Warner Bros Philippines quotation from distribution head Rico V. Gonzales are from BusinessWorld, “Philippine cinemas stuck in a rut after pandemic,” 10 June 2025, https://www.bworldonline.com/top-stories/2025/06/10/678112/philippine-cinemas-stuck-in-a-rut-after-pandemic/ . Claims about any single chain’s share of national screens are unverified and are not used.

First used in: 3.7 · The industry you are actually walking into