At Guanglu Cinema in Shenyang, the film now begins in the corridor. More than 300 classic film posters hang along the route to the auditoria, arranged so the walk to your seat reads like a visual chronicle of the medium. Old film projectors have been lifted out of their glass display cases and placed close enough for visitors to inspect the gearing, the reels and the mechanical detail that a vitrine normally turns into furniture.
That is the visible part of an upgrade the venue describes in structural terms. Guanglu is a 90-year-old established cinema that, until this renovation, was a single screening space. It is now presented as an immersive exhibition space for film history and culture — a film museum that still sells tickets to films. The cinema added photo spots, including a "starlight tunnel" and an interactive flip wall. Yang Fei, the cinema's director, described a film-themed cultural-creative market, immersive interactive projects, and study activities run alongside public-benefit screenings.
The scheduling change matters more than the decor. The venue says it has opened non-peak-hour space to cultural-creative retail, live sports broadcasts and study programmes, shifting from single-day peak business to all-day operation. In plain terms, the hours when nobody wanted a 2pm Tuesday ticket are now expected to earn something — from a market stall, a study group, or a match on a big screen.
Who pays, and for what
CCTV's report, published on 27 October 2026, is a roundup of formats rather than a set of accounts. It does not say how much floor space Guanglu has handed over to the market or the study groups, nor what any of it costs a visitor. That is the first thing a reader should notice about the genre: "cinema plus" stories tend to describe activity and skip the ledger.
The price points are not uniform, either. In Liangzhou District, Wuwei, Gansu, regular public-benefit screenings run at the city-wall ruins square, showing science films such as "Little Motor, Big Secrets" and "Qian Xuesen". Wuwei resident Chen Wende said the screenings require no ticket and no travel: after dinner he can go downstairs and watch a film, a cultural benefit "at the doorstep". So under one headline you have ticketed commercial programming and free open-air screenings. Worth keeping straight, because the phrase "cinema plus" is often used as though it described a single business.
A thousand screens, no numbers yet
Since the start of 2026, more than 1,000 cinemas nationwide have tried live sports broadcasts, covering football, table tennis and tennis, and the report describes this as moving toward regular sports-IP programming. The example given is a city-centre cinema in Guangzhou, using a very large screen, comfortable seating and surround sound to build a stadium-like viewing environment.
The venue is not named, and neither is a ticket price, an audience count or a revenue figure. The omission is not small. Showing a football match in a cinema works only if enough people will pay cinema prices to watch something they could watch at home, on a phone, for less. Until somebody publishes attendance or takings, "over 1,000 cinemas tried it" describes experiments, not a business.
Science, run by different people
The "follow the film into science" programme matches films of different genres and types to different fields of scientific knowledge, working through offline public-benefit screenings and hands-on interaction plus an online science platform, steering audiences from screen plots toward real-world science.
Two local examples show that the organiser is often not a cinema at all. In Zhuqu County, Gannan Prefecture, Gansu, the event took place at the county junior middle school: science and educational films were screened, science popularisation was folded together with scientist-spirit education, and a safety-awareness talk was given to students. Wang Xinqin, chair of the Zhuqu County science and technology association, described chaining together a mobile science museum, intelligent robots, science films and a science quiz so that scientific knowledge is "visible, touchable and playable". That is a science association using film as one component of a school outreach day.
In Wuwei, the square screenings sit with the residents rather than in a paid auditorium. Three different arrangements, then, sit under one label: a cinema adding programming, a county science body running a school event, and a district putting on films in a public square. It is worth asking which one a given headline is actually describing.
The box office is context, not proof
CCTV notes that the 2026 national box office passed 31.5 billion yuan as of 4pm on 26 October. It is a large number, and it does a lot of rhetorical work, appearing early and framing everything after it as an industry with momentum. It is not evidence that poster walls, flip walls, study groups or sports broadcasts pay for themselves. Admissions revenue is admissions revenue; ancillary formats need their own accounting, which the report does not supply.
The syndicated version on Sohu, credited to CCTV and published the same morning, frames the trend as convergence — cinema plus travel, cinema plus sport, cinema plus science — and calls cinemas important cultural-leisure venues in cities. That is the outlet's framing, not a measured outcome; the underlying reporting is the same set of venue examples.
The question to carry forward is dull and decisive: which square metres got converted, what they cost to run, and whether the study groups are still booking in February. Installing a museum in a corridor is the easy part. Making the 3pm slot pay for the lights is not.