Reception studies have made film audiences increasingly visible, while surveys track trends and policymakers gather information about audience preferences and demographics.

But little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and interactions between films and individuals that generate and sustain audiences. This monograph develops the idea of audiences as interactive and relational, introducing three innovative concepts: ‘personal film journeys’, five types of audience formations and five geographies of film provision.

A major challenge of audience research is how to capture the richness of people’s social and cultural engagement with film. To achieve this, the book uses an innovative mixed-methods research and computational ontology. It develops ground-breaking theory and concepts and an innovative methodology based on an extensive data-set derived from the under-researched area of British regional film audiences.