ShowcaseUk

A simple gem to pull cinemas and performances from the Showcase Cinemas UK website and spit out useful formatted info.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'showcase_uk'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install showcase_uk

The gem conforms to the API set down in the cinebase gem, andycroll/cinebase, which provides a lot of useful base vocabulary and repetitive code for this series of cinema focussed gems.

Performance titles are sanitized as much as possible, removing anniversary and restoration markers, "Sensory Friendly Screening" suffixes, language versions, years and festival prefixes.

No token or setup is needed. The website runs on Webedia's "Movies Pro" platform and sells tickets through Boxoffice. Listings come from the website's own /api/gatsby-source-boxofficeapi/ routes. The theatre list is in the website's static build, whose path changes every day, so the gem finds the current build from the home page first. The client and most of the cinema and performance logic live in cinebase's Cinebase::Boxoffice, shared with other chains on the same platform.

Only open UK cinemas are returned. The theatre list is cached for an hour.

ShowcaseUk::Cinema.all
#=> [<ShowcaseUk::Cinema ...>, <ShowcaseUk::Cinema ...>, ...]

cinema = ShowcaseUk::Cinema.new('X06JR')
#=> <ShowcaseUk::Cinema ...>

cinema.adr
#=> {
  street_address:   'Bluewater Plaza',
  extended_address: nil,
  locality:         'Greenhithe',
  region:           nil,
  postal_code:      'DA9 9SG',
  country_name:     'United Kingdom'
}

cinema.brand
#=> 'Showcase'

cinema.full_name
#=> 'Showcase Bluewater'

cinema.id
#=> 'X06JR'

cinema.latitude
#=> 51.4371

cinema.longitude
#=> 0.2705

cinema.url
#=> 'https://www.showcasecinemas.co.uk/theaters/x06jr-showcase-cinema-de-lux-bluewater'

Performance.at returns performances for an inclusive range of listings days, defaulting to today in London and the following 13 days. A listings day runs from 3am to 3am, as on the website. It makes one schedule request for the whole range and one request per 50 films, so a year ahead costs the same as a day.

ShowcaseUk::Performance.at('X06JR', from: Date.today, to: Date.today + 365)
#=> [<ShowcaseUk::Performance ...>, <ShowcaseUk::Performance ...>, ...]

performance = ShowcaseUk::Performance.at('X06JR').first
#=> <ShowcaseUk::Performance ...>

performance.film_name
#=> 'Hocus Pocus'

performance.language
#=> nil # e.g. 'Hindi' from the showtime's tags or '(Hindi)' in the title

performance.film_year
#=> nil # from the title only

performance.dimension
#=> '2d'

performance.variant
#=> ['subtitled', 'xplus']

performance.subtitled?
#=> true

performance.festival
#=> nil

performance.starting_at
#=> 2026-10-31 11:10:00 UTC

performance.booking_url
#=> 'https://tickets.showcasecinemas.co.uk/launch/ticketing/a1fe9520-bfb1-5b51-a278-58286ca0978a'

performance.cinema_name
#=> 'Bluewater'

performance.cinema_id
#=> 'X06JR'

Film release dates in the API are UK release dates, so re-releases would get the wrong year. film_year only comes from a year in the title.

The booking URL is Showcase's own ticketing page. The website also lists a relay provider for each showtime, used only when the Showcase link is missing.

Variants are 35mm, 4k, arts (event cinema, live and encore broadcasts), audio_described, baby, directors_hall, hfr, infinity_vision, kids, members, q&a, relaxed, senior, subtitled and xplus.

bundle exec rake          # unit tests against fixtures
bundle exec rake live     # live showcasecinemas.co.uk

Fixtures in test/fixtures are hand-written: invented films and addresses in the shape of Showcase's responses, never recorded output. test/support/api_shapes.rb describes the fields the gem reads. The unit suite checks the fixtures against it and the live suite checks real responses, held only in memory. When the API changes, update the shape first, then the fixtures.

Bump the version, merge, then run the Release Gem workflow in GitHub Actions. It runs the tests, tags the version and publishes the gem through RubyGems trusted publishing.

1. Fork it
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b my-new-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -am 'Add some feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin my-new-feature)
5. Create new Pull Request