I wish cinemas outside Dublin were a bit braver in what they show

I've no idea about how cinema businesses work and therefore this will probably come off as incredibly naive but whatever.

There's three big cinema chains in Limerick. Vue, Omniplex and Odeon.

Between them they are playing 3 big films 58 times each day. For example today, Wednesday the 25th of July.

Ridiculous. 58 screenings taking up 20 screens. A lot of these screenings, especially the early showings will only be showing to a handful of people. So few that it will actually cost the cinema money to show the film. Limerick isn't a big place. Dublin can have busy screenings at any time of the day but it will never happen here. And when I talk about Limerick I'm really talking about everywhere outside of Dublin.

So why not free up some of those screenings for lesser known movies. Why not take a chance on the breadth of fare shown?

Show the type of films that don't tend to get released outside of Dublin or the Palas cinema in Galway. The types of films that would entice an audience alienated by bombastic blockbusters and CGI filled comic book films back to the cinema. Treat them well and they'll keep coming.

Cinema chains claim to care about their customers. They don't though. If they really did they'd offer a wider choice. They'd aim films at foreign langauge speaking customers because maybe they haven't noticed this but Ireland is getting pretty multi cultural as of late. Showing more foreign movies would help broaden the tastes of Irish audiences too. Asian action films for example tend to piss all over Hollywood fare and if more people got the chance to see these films on a big screen they would do very well. I still remember the audience reaction during screenings of The Raid movies and it would be brilliant to experience that again.

So far this year we've missed out on critically acclaimed movies like Revenge, A Fantastic Woman, The Square, Loveless, You Were Never Really Here, Lean On Pete, Leave No Trace and First Reformed to name a few. Big important movies that dominated movie discourse online during Oscar season and we aren't even afforded the chance to see them in the cinema. That's a big shame. We've even missed out on Irish films here like The Cured, Kissing Candice and Citizen Lane. It's a sorry state of affairs when Irish cinemas won't even support Irish fare.

There's a lot of money to be made here. And cinema chains could get their hands on it if they had the balls to change things up a bit.