Sathyam Cinemas will open its second multiplex at Express Avenue, a shopping mall that is coming up on Mount Road.
Announcing this on Tuesday, Sathyam Cinemas Chief Operating Officer Tan Ngaronga said the multiplex will provide an international movie experience with plush seating arrangements, digitally enabled screens and RDX technology for high definition digital movie projection. The multiplex will house eight screens, six small screens each with 150-odd seats and two small screens with 300 seats each.
"The multiplex will be integrated with the mall that will have top players from retail segment and is the first step towards offering the best consumer experience in the city," Mr. Ngaronga said, adding that Sathyam Cinemas is planning expansions in Andhra Pradesh and Chennai.
The mall, nestled between Whites Road and Woods Road, is more of an extension of the existing multiplex, he said. "Chennai’s market is expanding at a fast pace. Audiences here demand a variety of movies — from Hollywood to Hindi and Tamil. Even other regional languages do extremely well here. We decided to split screens to offer choices to the audience rather than merging all the space into two or three screens."
Express Avenue Chief Operating Officer Kim Frederick Culley said the mall, spread over eight-lakh sq.ft., will fuse shopping, leisure and business and has been designed to house 50,000 people at any given time. The mall will also have a multi-cuisine food court, office complexes and boutique hotels. "The mall is the largest in southern India. We see a huge market in Chennai and this project will cater to the shopping and entertainment needs of city residents," he said. The Avenue will have six-storey tower blocks for hotel and commercial offices and one-million sq.ft. of retail space.
Express Avenue Chief Financial Officer R.R. Aroon Kumar said the building has incorporated energy-efficient measures and met the green building standards. The mall will be open to the public in early 2010, he said.
