The paradox at the heart of Indian cinema exhibition

There is a metric that governed how malls were planned, how leases were structured, and how cinema’s value as an anchor tenant was measured across India for the better part of a decade. Between 2010 and 2020, average annual attendance per screen held remarkably steady at around 110,000. It barely moved. Content came and went, ticket prices shifted, formats changed, but per-screen throughput stayed within a 5% band either way. That consistency made cinema a reliable planning input for everyone who built around it. Lease structures, tenancy mixes, common area maintenance assumptions, advertising rate cards: all of it was calibrated, implicitly or explicitly, to that baseline.

That number no longer holds. Post-pandemic, despite record box office revenues and a slate that has included some of the biggest spectacle films Indian cinema has ever produced, average attendance per screen sits roughly 20% lower. In 2025, India recorded approximately 868 million admissions across just over 10,000 screens. That is around 86,000 to 87,000 per screen per year. Revenue is at an all-time high. Admissions are not.

This is the gap that the real estate and retail ecosystem has not fully absorbed. And until it does, tenancy decisions, revenue projections, and expansion plans will be built on a foundation that no longer exists.

A behavioural shift, not a content problem

The instinct when footfalls decline is to blame content. Wait for the right film and the numbers will come back. There is some truth in that. Content quality is still the single biggest driver of a theatrical visit, and audiences have become far more selective about what earns the trip. But the larger shift is behavioural, not cyclical.

The family that visited a cinema three or four times a quarter now visits twice. The audience has not abandoned the habit. It has become choosier about when and why it exercises the habit. As many as 81% of cinemagoers surveyed in the latest EY-FICCI study say they prefer cinema to streaming. That is true. They mean it. It’s just that they are going to the cinemas less often.

What this produces inside a mall is a different traffic pattern than the one most tenancy models were designed for. The floor of daily footfall, the quiet Tuesday and Wednesday throughput that kept food courts ticking and escalators moving, has dropped. The peaks remain strong. A major release weekend still floods a property. But the distance between peak and trough is wider than it was before 2020, and that distance is where the old tenancy playbook breaks down.

If your F&B tenants, your fashion anchors, and your lifestyle retailers are planning staffing and inventory around a steady cinema-driven floor, they are planning against a number that no longer shows up on most weekdays. The cinema operator is already navigating this. The rest of the property needs to as well.

Fewer visits, higher value

None of this means cinema has become a weaker anchor. It means its role has changed, and the properties that understand the change will outperform the ones that don’t. A multiplex

remains among the most powerful footfall drivers in any mixed-use development. On a strong release weekend, it is often the single largest traffic generator in the building. But its value to the property is no longer just about headcount. The cinema audience today is more intentional, higher-spending, and more engaged than the pre-pandemic average. Multiplex ticket prices are 2.3 times single-screen rates. Per-guest spending on food and beverages has grown steadily. The guest who walks through the door in 2026 is worth more per visit than the guest of 2019.

For a developer, this requires a shift in how cinema’s contribution is measured. If you are still evaluating your multiplex anchor purely on daily footfall volume, you are using the wrong metric. The right questions are about dwell time, per-visit spend across the property, and the quality of traffic the cinema delivers relative to other anchors. A cinema audience that stays for three hours, eats before or after the show, and browses retail on the way out is a fundamentally different proposition from a quick-service restaurant crowd that enters and exits in 40 minutes.

The properties getting this right are the ones building complementary programming around the cinema’s rhythm rather than depending on the cinema to do all the heavy lifting. When the screens are full, the rest of the property should be ready to capture the spillover. When the screens are quiet, the property needs tenants and activations that generate their own pull. The days of a multiplex single-handedly sustaining a mall’s weekday traffic are behind us.

The midweek is fixable, but not by one tenant

The exhibition industry is already working on the midweek trough. Value pricing programmes, where specific weekdays offer significantly discounted tickets, have shown measurable results across the industry. National Cinema Day, which offered tickets at a flat discounted rate, drew over 6 million admissions in a single day. These are not gimmicks. They are deliberate interventions to reshape the weekly demand curve.

But this only works if the rest of the property participates. A discounted weekday show brings a price-conscious family into the building. If the food court is fully priced, if there is no coordinated retail offer, if parking policy treats a Tuesday visit the same as a Saturday visit, then the family watches the film and leaves. The cinema did its job. The property did not do its part.

The properties that will extract the most value from a cinema anchor in this environment are the ones willing to coordinate programming across tenants. Aligned offers on value days. Shared intelligence on traffic patterns. Joint activations during lean periods. This is not complicated. It requires the developer and the exhibitor to stop treating the lease as a transaction and start treating it as an operating partnership.

The paradox at the centre of Indian exhibition

India’s box office crossed ₹13,300 crore in 2025, its highest ever. Revenue grew 13% year-on-year and stands 17% above pre-pandemic levels. By every revenue measure, Indian exhibition is thriving. But admissions grew only 1%. That single number, buried in the same data that produced the revenue headline, is the one that matters most for anyone planning a property, pricing a campaign, or negotiating a lease.

The gap between revenue health and footfall health exists because ticket prices have risen and per-guest spending has grown. The industry is generating more value from fewer visits. This is not

inherently unhealthy. But it does require every participant in the ecosystem to update their planning assumptions. Lease structures calibrated to pre-pandemic throughput need revisiting. Expansion strategies that assumed the old per-screen economics would hold need stress-testing against the new reality.

The 110,000 baseline is not coming back. Not because demand has collapsed, but because the way people use cinemas has fundamentally changed. The audience is smaller, more intentional, and more valuable per visit. Planning for 85,000 to 90,000 per screen per year is not pessimism. It is the starting point for a tenancy model, a lease structure, and a property strategy that will actually hold up.

The developers who adjust now will build properties that work in the real market. The ones still planning for 2019 will keep wondering why the rest of the building feels slow on a Wednesday afternoon.

(The author is Managing Director, Cinépolis India. Views are personal.)