Playbook@Playbook_PB
Every generation gets to watch movie theatres die.
Ours has OTT. Endless libraries, zero commute, a screen in every pocket. The theatre, they say, is losing. And maybe it is. But somewhere in the 1990s, a different generation watched the same funeral. Cable television. VCRs. CDs. DVDs. The living room had swallowed the dark hall. The projector was flickering out.
It didn't die then either. But not because theatres are invincible. Someone simply transformed it to changing times.
India in 1990s didn't look like a country on the edge of a cinema revolution. Cable television was entering urban homes at a great pace. VCRs made Bollywood available on demand. Single-screen theatres, dark, crumbling, often unsafe, were losing the one thing they had always counted on: there was simply nowhere else to watch a film. That monopoly was gone. And with it, the logic that had kept 25,000 ageing theatres alive across India started to quietly collapse.
Most theatre owners saw a dying industry. Ajay Bijli saw a mistimed one.
Bijli hadn't come from cinema. His family built their wealth in road freight. Amritsar Transport Co., founded in 1939, was a North India logistics operation that had nothing to do with screens or stories. Cinema entered the picture only in 1978, when his father acquired Priya Cinema in Delhi as a diversification move. A single-screen theatre in South Delhi. Unremarkable. One of thousands.
When Bijli took over at 22, with no formal background in entertainment, Priya Cinema had weak film access, outdated interiors, and the kind of customer experience that made staying home feel like the better option. Then his father died in 1992. Then a warehouse fire destroyed the family's transport business in 1994. Every fallback was gone.
What happened next is the part that gets misread as desperation. It wasn't.
Bijli made a deliberate bet, not on cinema surviving, but on cinema being reframed. He poured money into Priya Cinema: Dolby sound, proper air conditioning, cleaner interiors, an upgraded lobby.
The transformation thesis was that affluent urban Indians weren't abandoning cinema because they preferred television. They were abandoning it because cinema had stopped respecting them.
The response confirmed it. Audiences from Vasant Vihar, Saket, RK Puram, South Delhi's prosperous belt, came back. Not out of nostalgia. Out of genuine preference.
In 1995, Bijli had taken the thesis global. PVR entered a 60:40 joint venture with Village Roadshow, one of the world's leading multiplex operators. India had zero multiplexes at the time. The partnership brought capital, international operational standards, and a model that had already transformed cinema-going in Australia and Southeast Asia.
In 1997, PVR Anupam opened in Saket. Four screens. Computerised ticketing. Multiple simultaneous screenings. India's first multiplex.
The number that tells the real story isn't the screen count. It's what happened to the industry around it. From one multiplex in 1997, India crossed 100 multiplex properties by the mid-2000s. Ticket yields at multiplexes ran significantly higher than single screens. Food and beverage became a revenue line, not an afterthought.
Cinema stopped being mass entertainment and started being a social occasion, something you dressed for, planned around, paid more for. This is the part that matters beyond the business history.
PVR didn't succeed because it built something new. It succeeded because it read something true, that India's urban consumer was not the same person she had been a decade earlier.
Liberalisation had raised disposable incomes. Global exposure had raised expectations. The Indian middle class had seen what a night out could feel like elsewhere, and was quietly measuring everything at home against that standard.
Single-screen theatre owners looked at cable TV and saw competition. Bijli looked at the same moment and saw a consumer waiting to be taken seriously. India was changing faster than the industry understood. PVR just understood it first.
Then came September 11, 2001. As hijacked planes rammed into the Twin Towers. The world froze. Everything was about to change.
But that story is for next time...
