From Single-screen to Multiplex: Cinema Exhibition, Urban Space, and Cultural Change in Indian Metropolises

Abstract

Cinema exhibition in Indian metropolitan cities has undergone a structural and cultural transformation over the past three decades. Single-screen theatres, once central to urban public life and collective cultural experience, have steadily declined, giving way to multiplex cinemas integrated into shopping malls and commercial entertainment complexes. This shift reflects broader changes in urban life shaped by economic liberalization, technological modernization, spatial reorganization, and evolving patterns of consumption. Focusing on major Indian metropolises—Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Kolkata, Chennai, and Hyderabad—this paper examines how the transition from single-screen theatres to multiplex cinemas has reshaped audience behaviour, exhibition practices, cinematic content, and the social meanings attached to cinema-going. Drawing on historical analysis, urban cultural theory, and scholarship in film and media studies, the paper argues that this transformation is not merely infrastructural but deeply connected to class formation, consumer culture, and the privatization of public space. Cinema exhibition emerges as a critical site through which contemporary metropolitan inequalities, cultural access, and urban identities are produced and negotiated.