How Multiplexes Found Small-Town Success

Exhibitors are opening theatres in locations with no quality screens for miles on end and attracting footfalls

- Soumya Gupta

On Sunday afternoons, the sprawling factories that make earthmovers, cars, heavy machinery, and industrial goods in Chakan, near Pune, are largely empty. Gleaming yellow earthmovers, fresh off the assembly line, line the dusty roads.

This is Chakan's MIDC Phase-II, home to factories of the biggest auto and industrial manufacturers in India. And in the midst of the factories owned by Bajaj, Tata, and Hyundai lies a strange white dome fronted by a low, grey facade. Enter, and you're greeted with a velvety red carpet and double doors into a domed theatre with a curved screen and roughly 90 velvet seats.

This outlet of the Mumbai-headquartered Chhotu Maharaj theatre chain is showing the Marathi film Gulkand. Its 30-odd franchises span big cities such as Ahmedabad and Varanasi as well as smaller towns such as Titilagarh (Odisha), Naharlagun (Arunachal Pradesh), and Sihora (Madhya Pradesh).

Despite a historic high in 2023, India's films business is struggling, particularly in the Hindi language. Fewer films are releasing, and fewer still are recovering their investment. Multiplex chains are unable to draw audiences to what was once the primary pastime of the country: watching the week's release on the big screen. Exhibitors and filmmakers blame each other for the decline in footfalls.

But, in the middle of the doom, a clutch of exhibitors is betting on India's fascination with the big screen. They are opening theatres in smaller towns and cities in districts where no quality screens exist for tens and, sometimes, hundreds of kilometers.

Apart from Chhotu Maharaj, these include Miraj Cinemas, MovieMax, NY Cinemas, and The Complex, among others. Most are focusing their efforts on urban clusters in West, North, and East India, where single screens have died but new establishments have failed to emerge.