We are inching towards recovery, pre-pandemic numbers: PVR Inox MD

Soon after PVR Inox’s third-quarter results announcement on Wednesday, AJAY BIJLI, its managing director, discusses the cinema industry’s current state and its trajectory with Vanita Kohli-Khandekar over a phone call. Edited excerpts:

What, to you, is the highlight of the first nine months?
 

We are inching towards recovery and pre-pandemic numbers. The results for October and November were a bit muted due to a huge event — the Cricket World Cup. It was held in India after four years, India was performing very well, and all the India matches were on a weekend.

Producers were sceptical about releasing movies during this period. The moment the cricket final finished, people were walking back into the theatres. December has been our best month ever. We didn’t expect Animal to do so well, but it did. Dunki did well in its genre, along with Salaar, Sam Bahadur, and 12th Fail. It is heartening to see that this channel (theatres) of watching movies outside of home is healthy.

PVR Inox’s press release talks about Tamil, Telugu, and other language films. Has the domestic crossover meant that PVR Inox is a national cinema chain in the real sense? How does it impact numbers?
 

Yes, definitely. The positive impact of Covid-19 is that people have started consuming films across languages. Therefore, when we release, we don’t look only at the region that a particular language or film is from. It is released across with dubbing. It is fabulous that movies are crossing over because then we are not dependent on any one type of movie.

Of all our (1,712) screens, 32 per cent are in the South, 27 per cent in the North, 20 per cent in the West, 13 per cent in Central India, and 8 per cent in the East.

(Note that nine of the 1,712 screens are in Sri Lanka). With the domestic crossover, the diversity of all the 14-15 languages (that films are made in) comes into play. Every other cinema across the world is down, but Indian cinema has grown about 12 per cent in value. (Theatrical revenues grew from Rs 10,637 crore in 2022 to Rs 12,226 crore in 2023, according to Ormax Media data)

Ticket sales (volumes) are still not back to pre-pandemic levels. (Indians bought 925 million movie tickets in 2023 against over 1 billion in 2019)

The pick-up in volumes is taking more time than I thought it would. This time (2023) because of the Writers Guild of America strike, there weren’t enough Hollywood films; that too pushed down ticket sales.

In 2022, Hindi cinema was not firing on all cylinders. In 2023, when Hindi had many releases, the number of films from Tamil and Telugu went down. Therefore, we are looking for that one year when every language cinema and Hollywood is ablaze.