The structural decline of India’s single-screen cinemas is creating a fresh growth opportunity for multiplex operators, with PVR INOX betting on smaller, affordable multiplexes to expand into underserved markets, Managing Director Ajay Bijli said.

The country’s largest multiplex operator plans to add at least 1,000 screens over the next five years, focusing on franchise-owned, company-operated (FOCO) and other asset-light models, with developers funding a significant share of project costs.

The opportunity is significant. About 16,350 of India’s 19,000 pin codes still have no cinema screens, leaving vast parts of the country underserved despite rising consumption, according to EY’s The Story of Film Exhibition in India.

India had 10,033 cinema screens at the end of 2025, only marginally more than six years earlier. Meanwhile, screen density declined from 7.6 screens per million people in 2018 to 6.8 in 2024, while nearly 1,000 single-screen theatres shut during the period, underscoring the structural challenges facing the traditional exhibition model.

“I started with a single screen myself, and the reason I moved into multiplexes was because it became very difficult to fill a 1,093-seat cinema throughout the year. I used to struggle to achieve optimum occupancy across all 52 weeks because you don’t get 52 films that can fill the cinema to the threshold where you make money,” Bijli said.

Unlike a traditional single-screen theatre that depends on a single film to drive admissions, a three- or four-screen multiplex can programme multiple films simultaneously, improving utilisation while giving audiences greater choice, he said.

The economics are increasingly prompting single-screen owners to convert their properties into multiplexes. PVR INOX is itself converting Mymoon, a prominent single-screen cinema in Kochi, into a five-screen multiplex in partnership with Lulu Group.