How we verify.
The Lumina Cinemas Index tracks 3,162 independent US cinemas. 620 are verified open today. Here's exactly how a theater gets listed.
What we list
Independent movie theaters: art houses, repertory and community cinemas, drive-ins, historic main-street theaters, discount houses, dine-in theaters, and small regional circuits. National chain multiplexes are not included. Every listing links straight to the theater for showtimes and tickets; Lumina never sells tickets for a theater.
Two levels of verification
- Verified by Lumina. A researcher confirmed the theater is operating from recent evidence (current showtimes, recent posts, or news), checked its details against public sources, and wrote its description. These pages show “Open · verified by Lumina” with the month.
- Found active. Our scanner found dated upcoming listings on the theater's own website within the next three weeks. These pages say “Active · upcoming listings found on its website” and are queued for full verification.
Theaters with no recent evidence stay unpublished until they're checked. Closed theaters are removed.
Sources
- The theater's own website: facts like phone, hours, ticketing, and social accounts. We never copy its text.
- Cinema Treasures for the starting list of theaters (facts only; we link to its pages and never reproduce them).
- Wikidata (CC0) for opening years, historic listings, and links to Wikipedia; Wikimedia Commons for freely licensed photos, always credited.
- The U.S. Census Bureau geocoder for map coordinates; OpenStreetMap for maps.
- Local news and official festival or city pages for history and events, cited on each page.
Descriptions
Verified pages carry an original description written from the facts above. Pages that are only found active carry a short factual description (what it is and where) until a researcher writes a full one. We don't publish reviews or ratings.
Updates and corrections
Theater websites are rechecked every two weeks. Anyone can report an error or request removal, and theater owners can claim their page for free.
Our crawler
LuminaCinemasIndexBot/1.0 reads one or two public pages per theater site every two weeks, honors robots.txt, and identifies itself with a link to this page.
Open data
The verified listings are available as JSON under CC BY 4.0: /cinemas/data/index.json, with one file per state. A plain-text summary for AI assistants lives at /llms.txt.