This Thursday when I made a visit to Ameerpet Bigbazaar which houses Adlabs on the top floor, I was stunned to see a serpentine line in front of the Ticket Counter. The advance booking has just begun and people started thronging the place like some mad gold rush.
People have really accepted the Multiplex Cinematic Experience. But the saddening thing to be noted here in Hyderabad is the presence of only 4 Multiplexes with combined screens of 17+1 (IMAX). Unless you book tickets in advance or thru Internet, it is really impossible to get your hands on the tickets for a new release.
The demand has really picked up. Recently Prasads has opened up another screen taking his tally to 6. The market has also made a Popular Cinema (Narshimha) to use his 2 adjacent stand alone theatres as Multiplex and branding them as “TALKIE TOWN”.
Still I find the infrastructure to be lagging the demand. And today when I visited Adlabs again to get my tickets which were booked from my mobile, the same scenario!!. It took me more than 30 mins.
Is Adlabs enjoying the collection due to its prime location? We cannot be judgmental so early. Getting tickets in Prasads is even tougher. And so are PVR Cinemas. The impact of “PLACE” can be answered with the opening of CINEMAX at Banjara Rd # 1 and the one at the GVK ONE. But I feel people here won’t really mind the distance if the probability of getting tickets is high.
One thing which I am still unable to understand is why this culture/experience so slow in the city where more than 400 movies release every year, city where the favorite time-pass of majority of the crowd is watching movies and most of the students who bunk classes prefer watching movies. Taking their purchasing power into account and the presence of more than 20 engineering colleges and Post Graduate colleges there must have been hundreds of screens across.
So is there some good real opportunity in this Business field here in Hyderabad? Well there are 30 screens ready to mushroom across the city and their fate could decide the further existence of Multiplexes and the business related.
