PVR-Inox to screen movie trailers for 30-minutes at one rupee to shore up footfalls

Gautam Dutta, Co-CEO of PVR-Inox said, "Trailers is all about sampling a film. If you like a sample of what you've seen, we believe that it would end up getting us a lot of additional footfalls."

PVR-Inox has priced the ticket at one rupee per show, and these will be slotted around prime time.

"Debated a lot about ticket price - at least for next couple of months we should focus on rolling the red carpet virtually free of cost for consumers to come and enjoy the trailers," Dutta said.

The 30-minute trailer show was first run as pilot across various screens, and PVR-Inox says it saw occupancies of over 35 percent.

This offering comes at a time when footfalls at the cinemas have continued to remain muted, despite the likes of Pathaan and Bhola clocking healthy box-office numbers. Experts, however, are not sold on the idea, and don't see this improving footfalls or F&B sales for the company significantly.

Karan Taurani of Elara Capital said, "This is an attempt to just get footfalls on board. However it's going to be a challenge because we don't know how many people will actually come to watch trailers. Most screen have 5 shows, and if you have these trailers being played you will see a disruption in number of shows, and that will bring down the overall efficiency. Also if the audiences don't buy food products, then it's a loss making proposition on overall basis."

But PVR-Inox is confident that despite a slowdown in footfalls currently, it is confident that the upcoming Salman Khan movie and the lineup of movies starting mid-May to June will bring a huge number of consumers back to the cinemas.

PVR-Inox will now start selling tickets to this 30-minute show on Bookmyshow and Paytm and says this could improve occupancy for this particular show to over 55 percent, and bring more footfalls for movies that go beyond the big names.