Martyn’s Law for Independent cinemas

Most venues struggle to pin down how many people they expect, because attendance swings with the weather, the night and the booking. A cinema is different: your capacity is built into the room. Fixed seats across your screens, plus the people working, give you a number you can state precisely and defend on paper. For a building type that has to evidence its capacity basis, that is a real head start.

The reason it matters is the 200 threshold. A single 260-seat screen with a dozen staff is already above it, so an independent with two or three screens is almost always in scope at the standard tier. The work is not in arguing about the number — it is in recording it properly and building procedures that suit a darkened auditorium.

The most common counting mistake is to think per screening. A single screen of 120 feels modest, so it gets recorded as the figure. But Martyn's Law asks how many people are in the building at the same time. On a Saturday evening, every screen can be near full at once, the foyer is packed with the next house queuing, and the café is busy — and the real same-time figure is the sum of all of that, not one auditorium.

Work from per-screen seating plans, your licensed capacity and fire risk assessment occupancy, and ticketing reports that show your peak admissions. Then add staff at the moment screenings clash — projection, box office, café, ushers — not the average shift. The figure you want is the building at its fullest predictable moment, and the evidence is already sitting in your ticketing system and your seating plans.

The hardest part of the four procedures for a cinema is communication, because your audience is sitting in the dark, facing away from the exits, absorbed in a film, with the sound up. A spoken instruction from the back of the auditorium will not land. So the plan has to include the mechanics of getting attention: a film-stop and house-lights-up step agreed in advance with whoever runs projection, and a calm on-screen message slide ready to show in every auditorium.

Then there is the foyer problem. When a screen empties into a foyer that already holds the next queue, you have a sudden crush in a shared space — so your evacuation and invacuation thinking has to decide, in advance, whether to hold a screen or redirect it. And because so much of this depends on the PA and the projection system, you need a fallback for when they fail: an on-screen alternative or a walk-round with a script, so a technical fault does not leave you with no way to speak to the room.

Two staffing realities catch cinemas out. The first is the late screening run with a skeleton crew. If your procedures assume a full team but your 11pm show has two people on, the procedure does not match the night — and the fix is either to staff to the plan or to write a plan that works with the people actually there.

The second is the front-of-house workforce. Cinemas often run on young, part-time and seasonal staff with high turnover, and it is easy for someone to start serving before anyone has shown them what to do in an emergency. A procedure that lives only in the manager's head is a procedure most of the team has never seen. A short briefing logged on day one — who raises the lights, who holds the foyer, where people go — closes the gap that incidents and inspections both look for.

Special events shift the picture. A premiere or a sold-out opening night can push your foyer numbers well above the everyday figure, and a Q&A, festival screening or private hire brings an external organiser into the room — which raises the question of who is responsible for what on the night. None of this is a problem, but it is worth recording the co-ordination: who holds the duty, who briefs the visiting team, and what changes about your capacity on that particular night.

The reassuring part is that the standard tier asks for proportionate, low-cost procedures, not expensive infrastructure. For most independents, readiness is a clear capacity record, four procedures written around the building, a logged staff briefing, and a review date — done calmly before the duties are expected to come into force in spring 2027.