S India last bastion for single screen cinema

Single screen cinemas, holding nostalgic, sentimental and historical significance may be falling by the waywide making way for modern day monsters — multiplexes and malls, but south India continues to be their last, strong bastion.

Despite the overall surge in multiplexes across the rest of the country, the south Indian market continues to be dominated by single screens, says the Ficci-KPMG Report 2012.

That, multiplexes represent just less than 15 per cent of total screens in India, paints the big picture that single screens still hold sway irrespective of all their pitfalls.

Of the nearly 10,167 single screen cinemas across the country, the four southern states of Karnataka, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh and Tamil Nadu account for as much as 6,320 cinemas representing nearly 60.87 per cent of the surviving cinemas. While Andhra Pradesh with 2,809 cinemas tops the table, Tamil Nadu stands at second place with 1,546, Kerala third with 1,015 and Karnataka, which once boasted of being numero uno for such single screens, is placed fourth with 950.

The reasons are not far to seek. Price caps on ticket prices in the states of Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh have been a major deterrent for the growth of multiplexes in these markets. Additionally, strong performance of regional cinema on single screen cinemas has ensured that respective state governments did not encourage unfettered growth of multiplexes at the cost of people-friendly single screen cinemas. So much so, the multiplex density by city, says the report, is among lowest in the South Indian cities with the exception of Bangalore given its cosmopolitan contours and large immigrant population.

Furthermore, what has ensured single screen cinemas to hold their own, specially in these markets, says the study, is the digitisation of cinemas as also regional flavour of content, which has emboldened single screen owners to invest from Rs 50 lakh to over Rs 1 crore in refurbishing their property. Also regional films from south find release with much higher density feeding single screen cinemas compared to north Indian languages. Says Real Image Media Technologies (P) Ltd Co-founder Senthil Kumar: “Conversion to digital has given single screens some of the advantages of flexible programming that multiplexes have. They can now schedule film releases even if for just one show per day on account of the significantly lower ‘print costs’ — a possibility that simply didn’t exist before digital cinema.”

Single screens market in India, thus, says the Ficci-KPMG study, will continually to co-exist with multiplexes, though their contribution to the overall domestic box office collection may not be sizeable or significant .