Cinema going in India now has had an uninterrupted run for over six months and it is pretty clear that the audiences are not back and now the onus falls on the exhibitors to bring back the audience they have lost. There have been films that have done extremely well over the last six months but good films are always going to do well but the problem lies that the audience for films that are average or poor is not there.

The industry will generally churn out 90-95% average to bad films every year which has been the case for the last 10-20 years and when these films dont collect as bad as they are doing now then it is a question of survival. The industry has to change the sort of films it is making and the tonality of the films which is very subdued and this change will have to happen but it wont change the fact that 90-95% of the films will still be bad or average which is the norm. Lets say it gets 5% better but this will hardly matter if these films are just not collecting.

The facts have to be faced by the exhibition sector that they have a lost an audience due to the two year break and a shift in audience viewing habits who are now just waiting for films for home viewing. The window has changed recently to 8 weeks before a film can come for home viewing and this might help a little but we wont know that for a few months as it takes some time for the audience to feel that films are taking longer to come home. In the pandemic people got in the habit of waiting months for new content so this 4 to 8 week change may not have much of an impact.

The second biggest multiplex chain in the world Cineworld has gone bankrupt and back home everybody knows the position of Carnival which was the fourth biggest chain in India and is on the brink. If collections continues like this then others are also going to feel the heat. No doubt films like The Kashmir Files, RRR, KGF2 and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 put a lot of houses in order as soon as the market opened up but if collections continues like this that will all change.

Basically exhibitors have lost an audience to streaming and now to bring that audience back they have to offer incentive to get their audience back. In the west as streaming services lose customers they are offering incentives to keep customers and this is what exhibitors in India have to do which is not happenning. It is a costly affair to go to cinemas in India so exhibitors have a lot to play with. Ticket rates have been played around with but the films that have done well have been on higher rates so this puts the theory of lower tickets down.

The issue here is that when a film is a good the ticket price does not matter much. Distribution is always about getting the most out of each admit and it works when the film is good. The probelm with tickets rates is that they are a hard call as Bhramastra is likely to have high rates and if it is good there will not be a problem. A Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2 had lowest rates possible but at higher rates it would have done more as the film was liked but which film will be liked and not liked is not known before release. Obviously for films that are not going to liked the base ticket price which is called normal rates within the industry is too high so this can come down but still there will be films coming on the super blockbuster rates.

Basically exhibitors have to start offering value to its customers and that will have to come from the concession side of the business as that is where the actual cost of going to the cinema is. The way it is going it will have to be done at some point and its best to start early as possible. The admits have to normalise and what sort of incentive has to be given to do that is unknown but without admits going up its a lost cause. ATP (Average Ticket Price) going up will hardly help in the long run with admits crashing. Once admits normalise then you can think about normalising pricing of concessions as well. Its a long road ahead and the exhibition sector has to do something.