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PVR expands high and low in India

Indian exhibitor PVR has given details about its expansion plan in India, which involves almost doubling in size over 14 months and adding both high-end and low-end cinemas to its expanded geographical base. “While the company is aggressively planning to open screens in north and south India i…

Indian Box Office Is Booming

Thanks to lurid exposes like the one which appeared in the December 22nd issue of The Economist most westerners probably think of India as a crowded and impoverished country filled with 1.1 billion people living in slums and working for miniscule wages. What they might find hard to believe, despite…

No ‘Welcome’ For ‘Sweeney’ At multiplex

Marcus Theatres has pulled “Sweeney Todd” from showing on any of its 49 cinemas as they thought Paramount was asking for too much. From Variety: “Unfortunately, as a result of the negotiations with Paramount reaching an impasse, Marcus Theaters will not be showing ‘Sweeney To…

Hollywood Rules India (For One Weekend)

For one weekend out of 52, Indian cinemas look like those in almost every other non-US territory dominated by Hollywood films. There were no less than five studio titles opening this past Friday: I Am Legend, 30 Days of Nights, 1408, The Heartbreak Kid and Air Buddies, with just one Hindi film (Hitc…

India’s Cinemax Crosses 50 Screen Milestone

Whoever is handling public relations for Cinemax India, Ltd. deserves a wee bit of a raise after last week. The circuit’s press release announcing the opening of their new four screen multiplex in Gandhinagar managed to be picked up by every major media outlet in India and quite a few outside…

Adlabs Expands Into U.S. With 200 Screens

The stereotype of the immigrant Indian convenience store worker that has kept Apu employed at the Kwik-E-Mart for the past 17 years on ‘The Simpsons‘ may soon have to be changed to that of the immigrant Indian concession stand employee. Recently, the Indian cinema chain Pyramid Saimira T…

A cinema holiday bigger than Thanksgiving

That would be Diwali, celebrated in India, its neighboring states and NRIs (non-resident Indians) all over the world. The five-day Festival of Light has in recent years become the favourite holiday for the big ticket Bollywood film releases. And this year was the biggest of them all, with the head-h…

Bomb in Indian cinema kills six, injures many

There are no ‘good’ places for bombs to go off, but to me there is something particularly despicable about bombings directed against places like temples, schools, nurseries – and cinemas. Six people were killed and 32 maimed and injured in a bombing of a cinema in the Shringar cine…

Rise of Multiplexes in India Doom Single Screen Theatres

Picture the following sentence at the start of a news article: “With multiplex industry’s soaring business and ominous presence, can the single screen cinema halls sustain its business?” It wouldn’t be a far stretch to imagine this sentence being ripped from a newspaper or magazine article abo…

How multiplex arrival changed Bollywood

A very interesting Q&A with author Anupama Chopr about her book King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema over at the Freakonomics blog by Melissa Lafsky. It looks at how the Indian/Hindi film industry (a.k.a. Bollywood) has changed in the last decade-and-a-half,…