Something I've seen that just really rubs me the wrong way:

The same reason that Americans and Brits can't agree on what to call that box you stand in that takes you to different floors in a building as an alternative to the stairs.

Technically, only the rooms with the screens are theaters. A building with multiple viewing theaters in it is a multiplex.

What about "Cinema"?

I skip the credits in a lot of anime films, but that's mostly because Funimation is the only dubbing company that actually bothers to translate the credits. It's really annoying to wonder who composed the music, and then discover that the credits are still in Japanese.

I know in Toronto(at least the people I know) we call the building the Theatre, and we call the rooms Screens.

edited 6th Oct '12 5:57:28 AM by Zendervai

Round here, the building is a Cinema, the individual rooms are Screens, and a Theatre is the building across the road where people do Shakespeare on a stage. Or the place down the road where they repair stab wounds and do liver transplants.

edited 6th Oct '12 9:33:51 AM by AndrewGPaul

It's "The Pictures" here.

edited 6th Oct '12 12:48:43 PM by TheBatPencil

You are a cinema, a Hollywood treasure.

We use cineplex (for the building) and cinema (for the rooms with the screens).

And theater for the place where they put on plays, and surgery for the place where they cut you open and stuff.

Not too interested in reading the credits, but I hate when TV stations shrink them down to a quarter of the size and fast forward. That's really breaking the spirit of having credits in the first place.

To Americans, "Cinema" sounds a mite hoity-toity. The whole structure gets called a "theatre," as does each auditorium containing a screen, because, once upon a time, movie theatres had only ONE screen. We still use the old nomenclature, and alls I can say is, it doesn't confuse US any. The technical term for a multi-screen theatre (in the US anyway) is "Multiplex," but nobody really likes that term much.

At least we don't still call them "The Flickers."

edited 16th Oct '12 4:13:43 PM by Robbery

So if you say 'I'm going to the theatre', where do people assume you're going? Because if I said that in the UK people would assume I was going to see a show/ play of some kind.

No one really says "I'm going to the theater" in the U.S. unless they're just going to a building that happens to be a theater. Usually people say "I'm going to the movies" or "I'm going to a play" or something like that.

Theater is the screens,Cinema is the building. But usually we say "I'm going to the movies" anyway,making both arbi

On the rare occasion that you hear someone say "I'm going to the theatre" (imagine it said with a boarding school accent, like "the-uh-tuh") I think that in the U.S. as well you'd assume they were going to see a play. It DOES get used that way but, as with "Cinema" is considered a bit high-falutin'. You're much more likely, even, to hear someone just say what play they're going to see rather than say "I'm going to see a play."

When I hear cinema, I think either of arthouse films or that Gary Go song that became a hit after Skrillex remixed it.

Usually I say "I'm going to the movie theatre".

That seems really wordy.

Actually, now that I think about it, the people I know at least call the building something like the "Cineplex", the "Coliseum", the Empire and so on. Depends on what company runs it, or if the company itself gave the building a name. Canada only really has two big chains, Cineplex and Empire, and Cineplex dwarfs everything else.

And some people refer to the screens as what number the room is. Like, the movie's in #3.

edited 18th Oct '12 12:22:02 PM by Zendervai

I think your sig applies well to this whole thing.