The Premium Screen Is Now India's Most Valuable Real Estate

This weekend gave the Indian exhibition trade a clean experiment. Two films, released a week apart, aimed at almost entirely different audiences, both grew on Saturday. The Odyssey took ₹22 crore, Dhamaal 4 took ₹10.25 crore, and neither appears to have taken much from the other.

The difference is the seat. The Odyssey is earning a disproportionate share of its money from IMAX, 4DX and recliner formats, where tickets in metro multiplexes have crossed ₹2,000 for the busiest shows. Dhamaal 4 is earning across a far wider base of ordinary screens at ordinary prices, and its strength is volume of footfalls rather than yield per seat.

For a country with 10,033 screens and only 3,150 of 19,500 pin codes served by a cinema at all, this split matters. Premium formats have become the highest-yield real estate in Indian exhibition, but they are concentrated in perhaps a dozen cities. The mass base is what carries a film to a century, and it is the part of the map that has been shrinking.

The lesson for producers is not that one audience beats the other. It is that the calendar now has room for both in the same fortnight, which was not true five years ago.