For half a decade the global exhibition business has rehearsed the same eulogy: streaming won, the theater is a legacy format, and the only question is how gracefully it declines. India keeps refusing to attend its own funeral. In an interview with Deadline, PVR Inox executive director Sanjeev Kumar Bijli lays out the case that the country’s dominant multiplex chain isn’t merely surviving the streaming era but exploiting it — treating the big screen as an event that other territories have forgotten how to sell.

The headline number is the argument. India’s box office reached a record $1.48 billion last year, one of the few markets in Asia to push past pre-pandemic revenue even as Hollywood’s pipeline thinned and streaming budgets swelled. The recovery, by Bijli’s account, was powered less by imported tentpoles than by a run of homegrown Hindi hits — the kind of star-driven spectacle Indian audiences still treat as an occasion rather than a queue on a home screen.

Bijli’s read is that demand was never the problem; supply and ambition were. PVR Inox, the merged giant that controls close to half of India’s multiplex screens, is answering with expansion rather than retrenchment, opening screens while chains elsewhere shutter them. Its Cannes acquisitions haul, routed through the company’s PVR Inox Pictures label, is the other half of the bet: buying international and independent titles to widen the slate beyond Bollywood and Hollywood’s leftovers, and turning the exhibitor into a distributor with a stake in what fills its own auditoriums.

The timing sharpens the point. Christopher Nolan‘s The Odyssey, the first feature shot entirely on IMAX 70mm, rolled into India on more than 2,500 screens with tens of thousands of IMAX seats sold before opening — the appetite for scale that exhibitors in slower markets now struggle to manufacture. Where Western chains talk about winning audiences back, Bijli’s pitch is that in India they never fully left; they were waiting for films worth the trip.

The proof points sit at opposite ends of the slate. Ranveer Singh’s spy blockbuster Dhurandhar became the year’s footfall engine, and Nolan’s epic opened July 17 on the country’s largest premium screens — two very different films arguing the same thesis about the durability of the theatrical event.

It is a strange inversion of the usual industry map: the market Hollywood long treated as an export afterthought is now the one writing the manual on how to keep the lights on in the projection booth.

Tags: box-office, Dhurandhar, market-strategy, PVR Inox, Sanjeev Kumar Bijli