Seven percent. That’s how much of the country actually watches a film inside a cinema hall Managing Director of Cinépolis India. He didn’t say it like a confession. He said it like the best news he’d heard all year. If seven percent is where we are, imagine where we could go
That was the mood through most of a conversation Storyboard18 had with Sampat, Kamal Gianchandani, Chief Strategy Officer at PVR INOX Limited, and Ashish Saksena, COO of Cinemas at BookMyShow. Convenience fees, Gen Z, box office flops, the film each of them could watch on loop forever, all of it came up.
The bit that stuck with us most was Sampat pushing back on the idea that young audiences have given up on cinemas. He thinks that’s a lazy story the industry tells itself. Gen Z hasn’t left, he argued, they’ve just been marketed to badly, by campaigns built for people twice their age. His proof was Housefull 5. He watched it in a hall full of twenty somethings laughing through the whole film, and joked he was easily the oldest person in the room. Everyone on the panel agreed Hollywood has cracked this better than most Indian studios, building marketing that travels the way young audiences already share things online, instead of hoping they’ll stumble onto it.
Saksena took on the convenience fee question, and to his credit, didn’t dodge it. It’s not some random number slapped on at checkout, he said. It’s worked out with each cinema, city by city, and shifts depending on the ticket price itself. On tier two markets, he made a point worth remembering: people there want the same comfort and service as anyone in a metro, even when what they want to watch on screen looks completely different.
Then came the question nobody really wants to answer. Who takes the blame when a film flops? Gianchandani didn’t flinch. No one sets out to make a bad film, he said, but the days after a weak opening weekend are brutal, not just financially, but for everyone who gave years to something that just didn’t land. He was honest that not every week is a win, and that a ten percent swing in annual footfall is simply the cost of being in a business run on public taste, which changes its mind constantly.
The warmest moment had nothing to do with numbers. Sampat talked about a cinema in Rajkot, where people took their shoes off before walking into a screening, because the film held real religious meaning for them. That’s not a detail that shows up in a box office report. But it says more about what cinema means in India than any collection figure could.
Towards the end, things got personal. Saksena named a film he’s watched so many times he knows every line, everyone guessed it was DDLJ before he confirmed it. Gianchandani talked about Titanic, and what it felt like watching it on a single screen years ago. Sampat picked Two States, because the story hit closer to home than he expected.
Funny, for a conversation built on percentages, pricing models and footfall data, it ended somewhere much simpler. People don’t come back to cinemas because of a pricing strategy or a clever campaign. They come back because a film once made them feel something they didn’t want to let go of. That hasn’t changed, no matter how much the business around it has.
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First Published on August 23, 2026, 11:31:01 IST
