ABSTRACT The Tudor Cinema was situated in Leicester’s West End, a thriving working-class district less than a mile from the city centre. It was built in 1914 with 975 seats, expanded to 1,250 in the 1920s. The Tudor faced competition from newly opening super cinemas in and around the city centre during the 1920s and 1930s, but like most neighbourhood cinemas in Britain during this time, its audience was both local and loyal. The cinema’s ledgers have already been the subject of some considerable study. This article uses a digital, computational analysis to further enrich understanding of the economic realities of the cinema as a business, as well as the cinemagoing habits of its audience during the transition to sound. It takes the Tudor as a case study whose financial records provide an important and revealing window into audience behaviour and programming during the final years of silent cinema and the first years of sound. It also argues that concomitant factors – such as the shifts in rental arrangements and Entertainments Tax – were as impactful, and in some cases more so, than the arrival of sound on the fortunes of cinemas like the Tudor during the period.