Priya Entertainments: From Scripts to Screens in East India

In March 2013, when the income statements of his nine exhibition halls started coming in, Arijit Dutta, Managing Director of Priya Entertainments, felt that the time has come for a few hard decisions. Since 1990, when Dutta took over the family business, Priya Entertainments has grown substantially from owning and operating a single-screen cinema in Kolkata to becoming a significant regional player in the film industry of the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. In the last five years Dutta has opened five new cinema halls, including two multiplexes. However, the profits of several cinema halls are meagre considering the whole range of operations that keep them running. Except for a few halls, profit margins are not very high. Occupancy rates are too low to recover the high establishment costs in time. On the other hand, the domestic film industry grew by 23% in 2011–2012. The Bengali film industry has also been showing signs of a revival and steady growth. The number of movies produced tripled betwen 2006 and 2012. Arijit Dutta understands the urgent need to find innovative solutions to save his cinema exhibition business. Closing down a few halls is an option but he is reluctant to take such a drastic measure before trying to increase revenues, or reduce costs, or focus on the large untapped population in rural Bengal.