Completing a month of its release in India on Sunday, director Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi Interstellar has had a smooth run. The film has been a blessing of sorts for Prasad’s IMAX, which because of its analog technology, is the only theatre in India which can screen the film in its true format.
As of Sunday, Prasad’s has had around 75,000 people coming in from all over India watching the film on the IMAX screen, which accommodates 630 viewers. T. Srikanth, general manager, operations of Prasad’s, says, “We have people from cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Kochi, visiting Hyderabad just to watch the film in the IMAX format. Over 60 minutes of the film is on IMAX.”
Compared to Nolan’s, The Dark Knight Rises (2012), which had just 6-8 minutes in IMAX, Interstellar has done “way better” commercially too. “Our last release in IMAX was a year ago (Man of Steel). And we haven’t yet made the transition from analog to digital prints, which is why we could screen the film in IMAX as the digital format hasn’t yet come up with a technology to fill the entire screen,” adds Srikanth.
But Interstellar might not do as well as one of its predecessors Avatar, which ran up to a year and was watched by 3.5 lakh people in just the IMAX screen. However, Srikanth feels that there can’t be any comparisons as Avatar had released five years ago. He adds, “We now have close to 70 screens in the city so there are many more options for people to go watch the same film. That’s why it would be unfair to compare the two films.”
