Without the firepower of 2022’s blockbuster hits RRR and KGF2, India’s largest film exhibition company PVR INOX took a hit across its key metrics such as revenue, profit, footfalls, and occupancy in the April-June 2023 quarter compared to the year-ago period.
The newly merged entity’s results declared on Tuesday showed that footfalls fell 22 per cent to 33.9 million for the quarter under review. It was 43.4 million in the year-ago quarter. The company broke out numbers to say that RRR and KGF: Chapter 2, which were running to packed houses at the time, alone accounted for 11.9 million footfalls in April-June 2022.
As a result, PVR INOX’s Global Box Office Collection for the current quarter was Rs 830.3 crore compared to the Rs 1,046 crore it was a year ago. Again, RRR and KGF2 alone contributed Rs 298.8 crore to that sum.
Occupancy rate for the quarter also fell to 22.3 per cent compared to the 31.4 per cent seen a year ago. The company which completed its merger early this year also reported a loss of Rs 44 crore in April-June 2023 compared to a Rs 142 crore profit in the year-ago quarter. Its income also fell from Rs 1,589 crore to Rs 1,324 crore during the current quarter.
However, average ticket price inched up from Rs 241 to Rs 246, while spend per head rose to Rs 130 from Rs 118.
The appointed date for the merger of PVR Limited and INOX Leisure Limited was January 1, 2023, and the merger became effective from February 6, 2023. Consequently, Q4 FY’23 and Q1 FY’24 results for the company are reported on a merged basis for PVR INOX and are not comparable with earlier periods. The firm said it has presented numbers pertaining to Q1 FY’23 on a proforma basis for like-to-like comparison.
The firm pointed out that the April-June 2023 quarter witnessed a muted start in April, with limited movie releases in Hindi. The box office picked up pace in the month of May with the release of, ‘The Kerala Story’ which turned out to be the biggest release of this quarter. But Hollywood came to the rescue as the quarter saw the release of the highest number of Hollywood movies post-pandemic. “Combined with a robust performance at the Box Office, it led to an impressive growth of 70 per cent in quarter-on-quarter box office collections for Hollywood films,” the firm said in release.
"The exceptional performance of Hollywood movies both in terms of the increase in number of releases year on year and the box office collections during the quarter reinforces our belief in consumers love for theater-going. It’s heartening to see the blockbuster success of unconventional movies like Barbie and Oppenheimer in India, clearly indicating that audiences choose the big screen for a unique cinema experience. Notably, the Hindi Box office has shown a gradual reduction in QoQ volatility, accompanied by improved performance of mid-scale Hindi movies, indicating a growing appetite for fresh Hindi content among the audiences. We strongly believe that as we progress through the rest of the year, we will witness a rising trend of Box Office across all genres,” said PVR INOX Managing Director Ajay Bijli.