Recent advances in display technologies enable home and cinema display systems to reach higher peak luminance and perceived Full Screen White (FSW) levels while also improving on black level capabilities. This next generation of displaying technology will help creators deliver content of higher visual quality, increasing the overall Quality of Experience (QoE) of viewers. However, there are growing concerns in the cinema industry that possible “mismanagement” or “misuse” of the new luminance reproduction capabilities may result in viewers’ visual discomfort. A typical example of potential “misuse” is abrupt temporal brightness transitions during a scene change or even within the same scene. Prior studies, which were conducted in a home environment, reported that displaying higher amounts of light could potentially lead to viewers’ visual discomfort. However, no study has been conducted in a cinema environment. In this work, we propose to quantify the human observer tolerance of temporal brightness transitions in a cinema environment through subjective evaluations. Different experiments evaluate the impact of various distributions of light on the screen, namely full screen, highlights, and noise patterns, and real images. Results of our evaluations indicate that the light distribution, as well as the peak luminance values, have minimum impact on viewers’ tolerance to temporal brightness transitions. In fact, observers reported visual discomfort only when the total amount of light on screen was varying significantly. More specifically, average luminance transitions from 0.1 and 1 cd/m2 to 35 cd/m2, were rated as “slightly annoying” and average luminance transitions from 0.1 and 1 cd/m2 to 75 cd/m2 as “annoying”. It is also worth noting that viewers reported visual discomfort at a similar transition intensity for saturated colors and white. The results of our study could provide useful insight to content creators, for example warning about temporal transitions that may cause visual discomfort.