This article is an international collaboration focusing on three European port cities – Antwerp (Belgium), Gothenburg (Sweden) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) – in 1952, during the golden age of cinema prior to the rise of television. The objective is to test an approach for making transnational comparisons of distribution and exhibition based on film programming data. We use a mixed-method approach that combines data visualisations based on a simple network analysis and time plot visualisations. Our aim is to show how these visualisations can be helpful in characterising and comparing cinema markets in an attempt to answer the question of how films move through a city from one cinema to the other and how this flow can be characterised and compared.