Everyman vs Everyicon vs Everywhere

We used to belong to Everyman Cinema.

At the time, the decision required very little thought. We lived in southwest London and our children attended nearby schools. We had also spent years in neighbouring districts, meaning the King’s Road formed a large part of the normal flow of life. School runs, errands, lunches, walks, meeting friends. We found ourselves there constantly.

The Everyman on King’s Road therefore became our local cinema almost by default.

That was no hardship.

For anyone unfamiliar with the chain, Everyman sits somewhere between a traditional cinema and a comfortable living room. The seating is significantly better than most multiplexes, with oversized armchairs and, in some screens, two-person sofas. Food and drinks can be ordered before the screening and brought directly to your seat. Pizzas, hot dogs, baked camembert, hummus, snacks, wine, beer and cocktails are all fair game. Watching a film there feels closer to being at home than sitting in a traditional cinema, except with a vastly larger screen and significantly better sound.

As moviegoers and loyalty optimisers, the membership was easy to justify.

We quickly adjusted our habits around the Members’ Monday promotion, regularly using the free guest ticket while also working through the annual allocation of included tickets. The economics were compelling enough, but the membership occasionally delivered something more interesting than simple discounts.

Many loyalty programs promise exclusive experiences. In practice, those benefits often amount to little more than marketing copy.

Everyman occasionally delivered the real thing. One screening was sponsored by Italian beer producer Menabrea, with complimentary beers flowing throughout the evening. Another involved an advance screening of Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest, followed by a discussion and Q&A with the director in front of a relatively small audience. Those events were not life-changing, but they were memorable and made the membership feel like something more than a discount card.

Then life moved on. The children changed schools and we moved. Not dramatically, but enough that the King’s Road stopped being part of our normal weekly routine.

What had once been a convenient local outing now required a deliberate trip. Cinema visits gradually migrated elsewhere. The alternative venue was perfectly adequate. It even had a bar attached and allowed drinks to be taken into the screening. But the overall experience felt noticeably less polished and far less distinctive.

Recently, circumstances changed again.

We now live within a few hundred yards of another Everyman cinema. The convenience has returned, and the cinema once again sits naturally within the flow of daily life rather than requiring a special trip. That naturally raises the question of whether it makes sense to rejoin.

At first glance, the £95 annual membership appears almost too easy. Six included tickets alone recover most or all of the annual fee at current ticket prices. Add the Monday and Tuesday guest benefit, discounted food and drink and waived booking fees, and the economics become attractive very quickly.

The complication is that Everyman does not allow membership upgrades during the year.

Choose the £95 membership and use all six tickets by August, and you cannot simply pay the difference to move into a higher tier. Equally, choosing one of the more expensive memberships only makes sense if the additional usage genuinely materialises. What initially looks like a straightforward £95 decision therefore becomes a more interesting optimization exercise.

At the time of writing, Everyman offers three membership tiers:

At our local cinema, ticket prices currently range from around £20 to £23 including booking fees. For simplicity, I used an average ticket value of £22 throughout the analysis.

The entry-level membership is easy to understand.

Assuming all six included tickets are used on Mondays or Tuesdays with a guest:

There is little doubt that the basic membership works. Use all six tickets alongside the guest benefit and the membership comfortably pays for itself. The included admissions alone exceed the annual fee before considering any food and beverage discounts, waived booking fees or occasional member events.

In our case, food and beverage discounts are not theoretical. A typical visit often involves a bottle of wine costing around £25-£30. Across six visits, the 10% discount is worth another £15-£18 before considering any food purchases.

The more interesting question is whether moving up a tier creates enough additional value to justify the higher cost.

The upgrade from Everyman to Everyicon costs an additional £255.

In return, the annual ticket allocation increases from six tickets to twenty-four tickets.

The easiest way to analyse the upgrade is not to compare £350 against £95. Instead, assume the £95 membership is already being fully utilised and ask what the extra £255 buys.

If the additional eighteen tickets are also used on Mondays or Tuesdays with a guest, the incremental benefit looks like this:

Those 36 additional admissions have a retail value of approximately £792.

The incremental cost is £255, which works out to just over £7 per admission.

The food and beverage discount scales as well. If a bottle of wine accompanies most visits, those eighteen additional outings create another £45-£55 of savings from wine alone before considering any food purchases.

Viewed purely through the numbers, Everyicon is surprisingly compelling. The economics are difficult to argue with. The real question is whether attendance actually increases from six visits per year to twenty-four, because without that behavioural change much of the theoretical value remains unrealised.

To fully exploit Everyicon, attendance needs to increase from one visit every two months to two visits per month.

If that sounds unrealistic, the upgrade probably does not make sense. If it sounds entirely achievable, Everyicon starts looking very attractive.

At first glance, the unlimited membership appears to be the obvious aspirational choice.

Compared with Everyicon, however, the numbers become more nuanced.

The upgrade from Everyicon to Everywhere costs an additional £330. Assume for a moment that you are already behaving like a perfect Everyicon member. You attend twenty-four times per year and use the Monday or Tuesday guest benefit every time. At that point you are already receiving forty-eight admissions annually.

The question becomes what the extra £330 actually buys.

The answer is simple:

Using the same £22 average ticket value, each additional couple visit is worth approximately £44.

The Everywhere membership therefore begins to outperform a fully utilised Everyicon membership after roughly eight additional couple visits.

In practical terms, a member already attending twenty-four times per year would need to increase that figure to roughly thirty-two annual visits before the unlimited membership begins pulling ahead on pure economics.

That is a much smaller gap than many people would assume.

The surprising conclusion from the numbers is that the difference between Everyicon and Everywhere is not primarily about ticket value at all.

It is about flexibility.

Members who are happy to structure most visits around Mondays and Tuesdays can capture most of the available value through Everyicon. Once someone is already attending around twice per month, the additional flexibility offered by Everywhere may not justify another £330 per year.

Members with less predictable schedules may reach a different conclusion. The ability to attend whenever you want removes the need to optimise around specific days and changes the programme from a discounted cinema membership into something closer to an all-you-can-watch subscription.

Viewed through that lens, Everywhere is not really selling additional tickets.

It is selling convenience.

I started this exercise assuming the £95 membership was the obvious answer. By the time I finished the calculations, the £350 Everyicon membership looked considerably more compelling than I expected.

The marginal economics are excellent. The additional admissions come at a remarkably low effective cost, particularly for anyone already comfortable treating Monday and Tuesday evenings as cinema nights. The gap between Everyicon and Everywhere is also smaller than it first appears, especially for members willing to schedule most visits around the days that maximise value.

The analysis also highlights a lesson that applies well beyond cinema memberships.

The difficult part is rarely the maths itself. The difficult part is predicting future behaviour accurately. Loyalty programs often look attractive because they are analysed through the lens of an idealised future version of ourselves rather than our demonstrated habits.

The question is not whether Everyicon works on paper. The question is whether we will actually use it.

After working through the numbers, I am going to buy Everyicon. That is not where I expected to land when I started this exercise. The original question was whether it made sense to spend £95. Somewhere along the way, the analysis shifted from justifying the entry-level membership to deciding whether we would actually use twenty-four tickets.

The answer is that I think we will. We now live within a few hundred yards of an Everyman. The cinema is no longer a destination. It is part of the neighbourhood. That changes the equation considerably.

Two visits per month sounds ambitious when viewed as an abstract annual target. It sounds much less ambitious when the cinema is a short walk away and already sits naturally within the pattern of daily life.

Could I be wrong? Absolutely. Many subscription businesses make money because people buy into an optimistic version of their future behaviour. Gym memberships, airline status runs, premium credit cards and cinema memberships all rely on the same tendency.

But optimization is not always about choosing the cheapest option. Sometimes it is about identifying the option that best matches how you genuinely expect to behave.

The £95 membership works, the £680 membership is tempting. But Everyicon sits in the middle, where the economics remain compelling without requiring us to become the sort of people who spend every weekend at the cinema.

Twelve months from now, I will know whether the maths was right.

The Redemption Framework

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