The magic of South Indian cinema

"South emerges the new hero in India's cinema landscape", read the headline of an article that traced the box office collection trends of movies post-Covid (Business Standard, April 19, 2025).

- AMBI PARAMESWARAN

The article also presented some interesting figures about the number of movie screens (cinemas) in India.

A question arises: How important is moviegoing in the life of an average Indian? When I started my life in advertising in 1979, I was a client servicing executive who was also tasked with the job of media planning. Those were the days of calculators and the large bound editions of the National Readership Surveys. What fascinated me was the stark difference between moviegoing habits of South Indian and North Indian consumers.

Almost 50 per cent of urban adults in South India visited cinema halls every month. The number for North India was less than 15 per cent.

Those were the days of single-screen cinemas, and cinema advertising was a monopoly of a company called Blaze Advertising. Again, going over the list of movie halls provided by Blaze, one could see that South India had a lot more and better quality cinemas than North India.

A trivia: Probably the first multi-screen cinema complex was in what was then called Mount Road in Madras (now Chennai). Called the Safire complex, it had four screens; now, no more. Coming to the disparity in viewing habits, was it just supply creating its own demand? More cinema halls, so more people visiting cinemas? Or was something more at work?