With Kollywood box office revenues growing significantly, tier-II and tier-III cities are witnessing sweeping changes as single screen theatres are being upgraded into multiplexes. This move has been spurred by the fact that multiplexes have experienced a 15 %-20% increase in the footfall throughout Tamil Nadu.
In Coimbatore, Inox will open 9 screens at the Prozone mall in 2016, which will be the second major multiplex in the city after SPI Cinemas opened 6 screens four years ago. Smaller towns such as Tirupur and Erode already have multiplexes, replacing single screen movie theatres.
“The single screen complexes are being converted into multiplexes. For example, Sri Sakthi in Tirupur and Sona Meena in Trichy have both been turned into multiplexes. The trend is that the single screen owners rebuild an old existing cinema. These multiplexes have cleaner bathrooms, better lighting and good food. This trend of rebuilding the cinema houses is bringing family audiences back to the movie theatres as women feel safe,” says Senthil Kumar, co-founder of Real Image Media Technologies, a company that provides digital cinema solutions to the film industry.
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Coimbatore, which has more than 10 multiplex screens, is seeing a trend of cinema theatres reducing the seating capacity per screen and going in for more screens.
R.S. Baalu, secretary of Coimbatore, Tirupur, Erode and the Nilgiris District Theatre Owners’ Association, told The Hindu that the average seats per screen in Coimbatore is about 700. Earlier, a movie used to be on seven to eight screens in a district. Now, it is at least 40 screens.
Further, the preferences of movie-goers are also changing. The average age of movie-goers is between 20 and 35 years. They prefer to go to theatres that are located nearby and expect quality and facilities. Hence, there is a trend among theatre owners here to reduce the seat count, go in for more screens and add facilities.
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G. Dhananjayan, who has worked in the industry as a producer, feels that ‘multiplexes are the future’. “We have already seen how in cities such as Coimbatore and Tiruchi, single screens are already making way for multi-screen complexes,” he said.
Asked if multiplexes could transform the business in the Tier II and III cities, Tirupur Subramanian, who is an experienced distributor, said that the government must look at providing interest-free loans to theatre owners in a bid to help them modernise their theatres.
“Multiplexes definitely bring in more audiences. The average theatre occupancy of a multiplex is easily 25 per cent more than the single screens. But the challenge is that smaller cities cannot accommodate more than 2 multiplexes. Even in a city like Coimbatore, we are already experiencing this,” says Tirupur Subramanian.
(Inputs from M. Soundariya Preetha)