India has fewer movie screens per million people than peer economies

New additions, such as PVR's planned 200 screens a year, to bring country closer to parity; sharp rise in global cinema revenues expected by 2026

India has fewer screens than most other large economies, though recent additions would bring it closer to parity.

Multiplex chain PVR recently announced plans to add screens at the rate of 200 per year. The company’s joint managing director Sanjeev Kumar Bijli had earlier said the firm aims to reach small cities, ‘especially the southern and eastern parts of the country’. Data from the PVR quarterly report shows that as of January 2023, there are 314 and 51 PVR screens in southern and eastern India, respectively.

In 2021, India had six screens per million people, whereas China and Japan had 30 and 26, respectively. India had seven screens per million in 2019. Other economies had more screens per million people, such as the US (125), the UK (68) and China (50); shows data from PVR annual reports.

The additions would mark a departure from the post-pandemic trend when the total number of screens in India had been coming down. Overall, India had 9,423 screens operating in 2021, a decline from 9,601 in 2018 (chart 1).

Andhra Pradesh has 1,125 screens, the highest among states and union territories, followed by Tamil Nadu (1,104) and Maharashtra (1,076).

According to FY22 data, PVR, which  aims to add more screens, had one-third of the footfalls in FY20. Across India, footfalls in multiplexes had declined over 70 per cent to 418 million in 2021 from 2019 (chart 2), though the outlook has since improved.  

The decline in footfalls was due to the pandemic and the rise of over-the-top (OTT) platforms, according to a management commentary, which also noted that big-budget Hindi films chose the big screen over OTT. The big-screen release of films such as <83>, and <Sooryavanshi>, set to release in 2020, was delayed for more than a year.

About 50-55 per cent of the total revenue of filmmakers comes from domestic cinemas and 10-12 per cent from digital or OTT rights to platforms such as Netflix, according to PVR’s report, which noted that the two can ‘co-exist’.

Box office collections have not yet reached the pre-pandemic level. India’s numbers showed a sharp decline (down 73 per cent in 2021 compared to 2019); than the overall global numbers (down 50 per cent) as seen in chart 3.

But the global outlook remains optimistic.

Cinema revenues post the sharp decline during the pandemic are likely to reach $52.7 billion in 2026 from $22.8 billion in 2021 as footfalls will increase from 3.3 billion to 7.7 billion in the same period globally, according to a PwC report.