Silent fall of single-screen theatres in Andhra Premium

Navarang Theatre in Vijayawada faces decline due to changing industry dynamics, revenue-sharing issues, and OTT competition.

The narrow lane outside Navarang Theatre in Vijayawada’s Governorpet was once abuzz with taxis and autorickshaws that brought an excited audience. On billboards, large posters caught the movie cast in the thick of action and drama, and in the air, hung faint snippets of dialogues and music wafting out from the hall.

Opened in 1964, Navarang Theatre was a cultural landmark, where rickshaw pullers and taxi drivers took pride in watching Hindi and English movies alongside the city’s elite. Blockbusters ran for months, with word of mouth doing its magic. Today, however, silence has shrouded the theatre, its empty seats and faded walls a stark contrast to the housefulls in its heyday.

Navarang Theatre is one of the last few independently run single screens in Andhra Pradesh. Most of its contemporaries, including the State’s first theatre Maruthi Talkies, Vijaya Talkies, Sri Durga Mahal, Mohan Das, all in Vijayawada, have shuttered, while many others have either leased out their theatres or rented them out as real estate properties.

The decline began decades ago, when televisions became commonplace in households. Then came the internet revolution, the smartphone penetration and, finally, the proliferation of OTTs. These, along with an “unreasonable” revenue-sharing model between distributors and exhibitors seem to have finally broken the back of this once-prosperous industry.

For Navarang Theatre proprietor R.V. Bhupal Prasad, its “passion” that keeps him in the business. His family used to own 13 theatres, including Saraswati Talkies, Saraswati Picture Palace, Leela Mahal and Navarang, across the State. Leela Mahal, which opened in Vijayawada in 1944, was the first theatre in the Andhra region of the Madras Presidency to screen English and Hindi movies.

Today, he agonises over which movie to screen. “It is exhausting; we don’t know which movie will strike a chord with the audience. Sometimes, even a big-starrer tanks at the box office, and sometimes, a small movie makes waves,” he says.

In a 2021 research paper titled Amplification as Pandemic Effect: Single Screens in the Telugu Country, authors S.V. Srinivas, a professor of literature and media studies at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru, and Raghav Nanduri say that around 90% of single-screen theatre owners in Andhra Pradesh have leased out their theatres.