Abstract blurred cinema lights

Data Licence

Clusterflick's screening data is free to use, including commercially, under CC BY 4.0. Credit us, and it's yours.

What you can use

Two datasets are published for reuse. Both are rebuilt daily and released on GitHub.

Data file per venue

Individual JSON files for the showings at each venue, all following the same schema. The fullest form of the data, and the one to build on.

Calendar file per venue

Individual ICS files for the showings at each venue. Subscribe to one, or hand them to anything that speaks iCalendar.

The licence covers our own contribution. Which film is showing, at which venue, on which screen, at what time. The booking link, the performance notes, the accessibility and format flags. The venue records, with their addresses and coordinates. And the normalisation and film matching that turns 400+ venues' wildly different listings into one consistent shape.

You can redistribute it, build on it, and sell what you build. There is no non-commercial restriction and no share-alike requirement.

How to credit us

CC BY 4.0 asks for credit wherever the data appears. Copy whichever of these fits — nothing more elaborate is expected.

Markdown
Screening data from [Clusterflick](https://clusterflick.com) (CC BY 4.0)
HTML
Screening data from <a href="https://clusterflick.com">Clusterflick</a> (CC BY 4.0)
Plain text
Screening data from Clusterflick - clusterflick.com (CC BY 4.0)

Rendered, that reads Screening data from Clusterflick (CC BY 4.0). Link the words rather than pasting a bare URL if your medium allows it, and put it somewhere a reader would look — a footer, an about page, a caption. The licence also asks that you say so if you have changed the data.

Calendar feeds carry the same credit inside the file, in their X-WR-CALDESC property, because a feed someone has subscribed to has left everything else behind. Leave it intact if you pass a feed on.

What the licence doesn't cover

Film metadata isn't ours to give away.

Synopses, cast and crew, release dates, poster art and trailers come from The Movie Database (TMDB). We use it under the TMDB API terms of use, which don't let us sublicense it onwards. So it is excluded from the CC BY 4.0 grant: your use of it is a matter between you and TMDB, on their terms rather than ours. If you show any of it, read their attribution requirements and follow whatever they ask for at the time.

In the per-venue JSON these fields are separable — they live in a themoviedb object (and a themoviedbs array for events covering more than one film) on each matched showing. Drop those keys and what remains is entirely CC BY 4.0. The TMDB id is still worth keeping as a join key if you hold your own TMDB credentials.

In the calendar feeds they aren't separable: the synopsis and cast are written into each event's description as prose. If you need a clean split, work from the per-venue JSON instead.

The ratings and review scores shown on film pages are not part of either dataset, and are not licensed for reuse. Each belongs to the site it came from.

Everything else is an internal build artifact

The pipeline runs in the open, so every stage of it is published. Most of those releases exist to feed the next stage, not to be used.

None of the repositories below is licensed for reuse. They carry third-party content we hold no rights in, they have no schema guarantees, and their shape changes whenever the pipeline needs it to — without notice, without a version bump and without a deprecation period. If you build against one, it will break, and that will not be a bug.

  • data-retrievedRaw scrapes, stored close to verbatim. The content belongs to the venue sites it came from.
  • data-combinedEverything merged into one file for the website to load. Carries whatever the upstream stages carry.
  • data-cachedFilm metadata cached from TMDB. Theirs, not ours — get it from TMDB under your own terms.
  • data-matchedRatings from IMDb, Letterboxd, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and the Bechdel Test, each belonging to its source.
  • data-diffedWhat changed between two runs, so the New Listings feed doesn't have to recompute it.
  • data-analysedHourly venue health telemetry, driving the status panel on the About page.

None of this applies to the code. Every repository in the pipeline, these included, is open source under the MIT licence. What changes from one repository to the next is only the terms on the data it releases.

No warranty, no promises

This project publishes on a best-effort daily schedule.

The data is provided as-is. There is no warranty, and no guarantee of accuracy, availability or continuity. Screenings get cancelled, venues change their websites, matches go wrong and runs fail. Always send people to the venue's own booking page before they turn up. The schema of the licensed datasets is stable in practice, but it is not frozen, and we will change it when we need to, aiming as best we can to keep it backwards compatible.

Releases are hosted by GitHub rather than by us, so whatever you build against them lives within GitHub's rate limits. Authenticated requests get a far higher allowance than anonymous ones, which is the usual fix if you start seeing 403s.

Questions

If something here is unclear, or you want to use the data in a way this page doesn't obviously allow, email [email protected] and ask. We would rather answer than have you guess. If you build something, tell us — there is a list of sites built on this data and we'd like to add you to it.