Television-Video-Cable wave of the 1980s & the 1990s was more dangerous for theatres than Covid-19: Vishek Chauhan

For more than a century, cinema has weathered one challenge after another. First came television, then video cassettes, DVDs, cable TV, and now streaming platforms. Each new technology was expected to replace movie theatre. Yet, theatres have survived every wave of change. Of late, admissions to theatres have risen thanks to the massive success of event films such as The Dhurandhar Franchise films, The Odyssey, and the latest sensation: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which has collected in Rs256 crore in the past three days of its release.

Vishek Chauhan, a veteran exhibitor who has seen multiple cycles of the theatre business in India from the 1980s till date, explains that the genesis of survival of theatres lies not only in showing films but in bringing people together for a shared experience. Chauhan, who is the CEO of Roopbani Cinema, a Bihar-based single-screen theatre, in his book Cinemas Forever: How Movie Theatres Fought Back Against TV, Home Video, Streaming―and Survived Two Pandemics, foresees the growth of India’s exhibition industry in building the first good screen in the hundreds of under-screened towns where the audience is large, hungry and currently ignored.

Edited Excerpts:

What factors have led to the survival of movie theatres despite so many onslaughts challenging their relevance?

The honest answer is that every obituary for the cinema misread what a cinema is. People assumed we were in the business of showing films. We are not. We are in the business of gathering people. Television, video, DVDs, streaming — each delivered a film better, cheaper and more conveniently to your living room. None of them delivered a room. The collective gasp, the shared laughter, the stranger next to you crying at the same frame — that has no home-delivery version.

There is also a hard commercial reason the trade understands well. Theatrical is still the marquee that sets a film's worth everywhere else. A film's streaming value, its satellite value, its cultural footprint — all of it is priced off the opening weekend. Kill the theatre and you don't just lose a window. You lose an event that gives the whole pyramid its value. Producers know this. This is a reason why every few years the very people who declared us dead come back to release their biggest film on our screens first.

Which has been the toughest phase of survival for movie theatres in India?
It was the pandemic. The year 2020 was the sharpest single shock we have ever taken — overnight, every screen in the country went to zero revenue with fixed costs still running. But if you ask me which phase did the most lasting damage it was the long assault of the late 1980s and 1990s.

And people misremember that era as one threat at a time. It was not. Television and home video exploded at almost the same moment. The VCR and the cassettes arriving just as colour TV was reaching every middle-class drawing room. And then the cable came roaring right behind them.

So, within a single decade, the Indian household was hit by a huge influx of cheap and in-home entertainment all at once. That pile-up is what broke the back of the single screens. It was a slow bleed. It killed more theatres than any virus— thousands of them shut, quietly, town by town, and most never reopened. My own family lived through it.

The difference from the pandemic is instructive. The Covid period was a shock we recovered. This is because the underlying desire never went away. The day we reopened theatres people came back. The television-video-cable wave was more dangerous precisely because it was gradual and relentless. It convinced an entire generation of exhibitors that surrender was the only option. The ones who survived were the ones who refused to believe the obituary being written about them.

How dramatic has been the shift and where do we stand as on date?
Here is the figure that surprises people: India's total screen count has barely moved. According to the FICCI-EY 2026 report, India had about 10,033 screens in 2025 — up just 1% on the year, South India down 1% and the rest of the country up 3%. We are sitting at roughly the same ten-thousand-odd screens we have had for years. So, on the surface, nothing happened.

But that flat number hides a complete change of the guard. A decade and a half back, almost all screens were single screens — they fell from around 10,000 in 2010 and then their numbers fell further to under 7000 by 2019. Subsequently, their business was impacted. Even in 2025, Andhra Pradesh alone lost 54 screens and Karnataka 29, while Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Kerala and Maharashtra added new ones. My own estimate after talking to fellow exhibitors is that well over a thousand single screens have gone dark in the past five years. Multiplexes have added a roughly similar number in the same window. So, the total holds near 10,000. But the composition of the Indian exhibition industry has flipped from single screens to multiplexes.

A ballpark estimate points out that of the total screens about 10,000 multiplex screens are about 6,000–6,500 and growing. Single screens can be in the range of 3,500–4,000. Single screens are still shrinking especially in the South. The crossover has already happened. India is no longer a single-screen country.

And here is the number that should keep the whole industry awake. In India, more than 16,000 pin codes have no cinema screen at all. Only around 10% of Indians visit a cinema in a year even though 81% say they would rather watch a film in a theatre. We are not an over-screened country dying of excess. We are a drastically under-screened one starving in the middle of its own demand.

Will the IMAX revolution and other technical innovations shape the way stories are selected and made?
They already are. This is both opportunity and risk. Large-format and premium screens have created a clear lane for "big-screen-worthy" film: the spectacle, the event, a picture which diverts attention of a view away from a phone. Filmmakers are now consciously designing for that scale. That is healthy. It gives theatres a reason to exist that no living room can match.

The risk here is homogenisation. If the only films deemed worth a theatrical push are loud, VFX-heavy tentpoles, then we are starved of mid-budget human drama that has always been the soul of our cinema. Technology should expand the menu and not shrink it. Smartest exhibitors and producers will use these formats to make theatres a destination for event, while fiercely protecting space for smaller films which still deserve a collective audience.

What is your view on theatres focusing on creating a hotel-like environment? Is that a deterrent given the high cost of a theatre outing?
Premiumisation is a brilliant strategy for the markets which can absorb it. Recliners, gourmet food, and luxury services rescued the economics of metro multiplexes. But the industry made one quiet, costly error along the way. In chasing a premium customer, we abandoned the mass audience. We priced out ordinary families of the very habit of going to theatres.

The future is not luxury versus affordability. You need the Rs500 luxury seat in Mumbai and the Rs100 seat in a small town. It is segmentation. They are two completely different businesses serving two completely different audiences. The largest untapped audience in this country is not sitting in multiplexes. They are in tier-3 and tier-4 areas in India. These audiences have no decent screens near them at all. If exhibitors give them quality at a price that respects their wallet, then that is the biggest opportunity in the Indian exhibition sector.

How do you see theatres evolving especially as content becomes hyper-localised?
The single most important shift of this decade is that the centre of gravity has moved. For a generation, a blockbuster was Hindi and it travelled outward. Today, the biggest theatrical phenomena have come from the South, from regional industries, from films rooted in a very specific soil that then exploded nationally — Baahubali, KGF, Pushpa, and Kantara. Hyper-local content is not a threat to theatres. It is the fuel for our next expansion.

There is a reason behind this. Local content needs local screens. Opportunity is no longer in adding the tenth multiplex in a metro which is already saturated. Opportunity is in building the first good screen in the hundreds of under-screened towns where the audience is large, hungry and currently ignored. In my view, the theatre of the future is not only a luxury box in a mall. It is a combination of a community anchor in a tier-3 town, programming a mix of a national tentpole and a regional film. The future growth of India’s exhibition industry is in this combination.