£4 Cinema Tickets Across London This Saturday and Sunday

National Cinema Day has become National Cinema Weekend. On Saturday 5 and Sunday 6 September, participating UK cinemas charge £4 — 'any format, any seat, any film', with the campaign noting that this is an advised price and may vary at a small number of sites.

The catch is participation, and in London it is patchy in a way worth checking before you travel. The official list returns 551 venues today, 52 of them with London postcodes and roughly twenty more in outer boroughs. But search that list for Curzon, Everyman, BFI Southbank, the Prince Charles, Rio Dalston, Genesis, Peckhamplex, The Lexi, The Garden Cinema, Ciné Lumière or the Electric and you get nothing at all. The chains are in. Much of London's independent sector is not.

Phil Clapp, chief executive of the UK Cinema Association and director of Cinema First: 'We're excited to be extending the celebration to the entire weekend, giving cinemagoers greater flexibility to plan their visits.'

The terms repay reading. Cineworld puts £4 on 2D, 3D, 4DX, Superscreen, Recliners and ScreenX, with a £2 uplift making IMAX £6, and excludes event cinema entirely. Showcase excludes specific titles — Shaun the Sheep: The Movie, the extended Lord of the Rings trilogy, the Hunger Games marathon and a Dirty Dancing Popcorn & Prosecco party — and withdraws its Gallery benefits for the weekend. The campaign hub sells nothing itself; it sends you to each cinema's own site, and advises booking ahead because screenings are expected to sell out.

What is actually on: Friday 4 September brings The Incomer from Universal, Super Nature from the BFI, a Terminator 2 re-release from Studiocanal, Shaun the Sheep: Farmageddon, Late Fame and five Hunger Games titles. One correction to the listings doing the rounds — Hugh Jackman's The Death of Robin Hood, with Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård and Noah Jupe, did not open on Friday. It came out on Wednesday 2 September, is certificate 15 at 122 minutes, and is already playing across Cineworld, Picturehouse, Odeon and Vue sites all over London.

Some history for scale. Cinema First launched this format in 2022 with the Film Distributors' Association and the UK Cinema Association; in 2024 it drew more than a million admissions across 630 venues, and it was paused last year. The original National Cinema Day was held in June 1996, when the ticket was £1.