PVR Cinemas - A Raw Deal (once)
(changed the heading of the post upon reading from comments that it doesn't happen often. But it did happen with me, so am still gonna retain the post)Yet another crib session.
Just now got a forward from a friend that said about a plan to boycott all the theatres , malls and restaurants in Bangalore by the software guys for a month so as to teach them a lesson not to hike the prices for no reason.
Now this reminded me of something that I wanted to post a few weeks back and forgot. So doing it now.
After my last visit to PVR, I swore not to go there again. Here's why:
I buy tickets for Lage Raho Munnabhai late nite show on a sunday. Price - Rs.180/-. The ticket said the movie starts at 10pm. I was already running late, so I quickly gobbled up my icecream (I got one more crib session on this icecream coming up) standing outside the entrance (they wont let you take outside food inside the theatre) and manage to get in right at 10:05 pm so that I don't miss the start of the movie.
I wait and wait and wait for the movie to start, but all I see is commercials of some goddamn underwears and toothpastes and colas. And the movie finally starts at 10:40 pm. WTH?????
I didn't pay 180 bucks to these fellows to sit and watch commercials, I can do that right at home on TV!!!
First of all I am pissed with the unreasonable prices of the ticket. And to top it, they show me ads!!!!
In Hyd, the ticket costs 60-80 bucks in a posh theatre Prasads. And PVR in Hyd charges 100/-. Then why is it 180/- in Bangalore? Even if they have their own reasons....why the hell does the customer have to watch ads after paying so much?
Me not happy! Me not going there again. Me ain't letting that fella walk all over me!
Labels: PVR Cinemas
posted by Tweety @ 11:28 PM
19 Comments:
oh this is news to me.. since when did they show ads for 40 mins ? it wasnt like this whenever i have gone. ads mostly for 5 mins max.. i can put up with it trying to settle into the seat and making fun of the ads. but 40 mins sucks. maybe they had technical problems.. did u speak to someone about this?
am ok with the price but cant stand ads or not starting movie on time at all.
this friend of mine seems to be one crib creature.. complaints and dissatisfaction in everything... how come he is comparing it with Prasad of hyd... he must be blind or just plain "duniya se dukhi" creature.. I have my question to ask him..
a.. did PVR force you to take out Rs.180/- of your wallet or they will make ur life miserable in b'lore..
b.. dont blow things out of proportion, i haven't seen ads for 40min whenever i have been to PVR or any damn cinema...can u recollect all those ads??
c.. If you had so much problem y didnt u meet any executives or manager available..
I didnt mean to point mistakes in ur opinion but friend it must b a resonable one.. look at the ambience of PVR and u compare it with Prasad.. grow up and be mature pal...
@Tom:
If they did have some technical problems, they should have informed the same on the screen to the customers...shouldn't they?
They didn't care about doing it, I didn't care about talking to them. Simple.
@Kshitij:
1. I am a she, not he. And I am no friend of yours. If you want to judge me as a crib creature, sure go ahead...it's your problem, not mine.
2. PVR did not force me to take out 180 bucks for the movie, but they sure didn't tell me about the 40mins ads that are going to be shown for that.
3. Well, I didn't talk to any manager there coz I wasn't planning to go back there again.
4. Why would I recollect any of those ads when I was damn pissed with them.
5. I did not blow anything out of proportion, it's true what hapenned. I have no business to do that.
6. Regarding the ambience...I don't find anything so damn great. At the same time, its not bad either. Again, if you hadn't read properly, I wasn't 'complaining' of the ambience.
7. My post isn't much about why it costs 180 bucks. It is about why shoud the audience see so many ads inspite of paying so much.
8. Having said all this, I must also tell that I am a share holder of PVR Cinemas and wouldn't just go around complaining unless I had no interest in my money. I just showed black as black and white as white.
9. I appreciate that you didn't leave your comment with an anonymous identity. Here's a question: So are you working with PVR?
Uh-oh. Do I sense a 3rd world war in the making here?
@Jen: No war dear. Just a plain Q&A.
PVR and all of its ilk is so symptomatic of bangalore...lots of hoo haa.
basically, bangalore was a great city that is now a gargantuan hyped up zeppelin.
case in point, try going to some of these posh housing complexes. one road trip to one of those (my wife's cousin's housewarming) screwed my car like a goddamn gangbang...
180 bucks for 40 mins of ads..let's see... dat's not too bad...Re. 0.075 per second or Rs. 4.50 per minute. considering they charge Rs.500 for one large in Fuga (which works out to 8.33 per ml), i'd say, by bangalore standards, u got a dirt cheap deal.:-))
@ Mr. Kshitij – I got irked by the statement - "complaints and dissatisfaction in everything...". Probably you aren't "blind" as you thought the author to be, but you sure seem to have a problem of
'selective vision' - being able to see ONLY the posts that crib about something.
I wanted to put in some real statistics here, so I went around and collected some info on this blog: (yea, am so jobless this evening!)
Total no of posts: 31
Total no of posts that 'crib': 10 (topics ranging from ' cab driver killing BPO employee' to 'this was a boring week' to 'I lost my mobile phone') And the rest were happy posts. Looks like you can't see them! Or, you seem to have read the home page of this blog, and reached a conclusion. Now that doesn't look like what mature people do!
And then the statement "i haven't seen ads for 40min whenever i have been to PVR or any damn cinema"
Neither has the author of this post during her previous visits to any damn cinema. And this time around, she saw 40 minutes of ads. And thats the whole damn issue she is cribbing about!
(On a side note, You sure seem to have missed the video between the two 'crib' posts. Go, install Flash player – if you don't have one, and watch the video. Will give you some relief from your "duniya se dukhi" mood. Looks like you are the one who is actually suffering from that! And DONT visit my blog. You might be tempted to put in comments like – "You seem to be cribbing about bugs in flash. Did macromedia force you to buy it?")
@kshitij.. which school of trolling are you from? :p
@ajishnu.. 180 bucks for 40 mins of ads.. we dont pay money to watch ads in the first place. what would make a better business model is making us watch the movie for free since we wud have watched 40 mins of ads ;)
Wow! 40 mins of ads. That would be sufficient to make me boycott a theatre.
I have stopped going to Prasad's because they charge me 10 bucks for parking. :)
PVR in Hyderabad is a classic example of why we need competition in the market. Prasad's forces it to keep prices down and since it is located in Hyderabad Central we get parking for free.
I also suggest you write to PVR and send them a link to your post.
Sups
I want to give you some idea about why the cost of the ticket is so high in PVR.
When Fanaa was released, Yash Raj Films for the first time, took up a fight against the multiplexes asking for a bigger, better cut. You know as a distributor, Yash Raj Films wanted more than what the multiplexes take home. Soon, Vidhu Vinod Chopra followed suit and did the same thing. When releasing Lage Raho, he also demanded a higher cut on the multiplexes.
Funnily, do you know what happened at the end of all the negotiations between distributors and multiplexes? They decided to increase the cut for the distributors and make the film goers pay the additional money :-)
What would otherwise be a 100-rupee ticket is now 180. For certain films (usually big banners), you will see the price go up while others like Woh Lamhe will stick to the 100 rupee pricing.
When any movie producer declares that his/her movie earned 40 crores in the opening weekend, it's all because of the prints released in the country and the business that the multiplexes bring in.
Consider this: DON was released in 2 Gold Class theatres, 2 Europa halls and 1 Classic hall. Each hall runs 4 shows a day. Gold has a capacity of 25 and costs Rs.350 per head, Europa 100 seats and costs Rs. 250 and Classic 250 seats and costs Rs. 180. So Gold makes 70K per day, Europa makes 2lac per day and Classic makes 1.8L. In one day for a movie like DON, PVR makes 4.5 lacs out of which they pay about 50% to the distributor. This is just for 1 day and only 5 prints are used. So assuming the movie runs housefull for 2 weeks, PVR will end making 63 lacs. For the distributor, this is just one multiplex in one city. The distributor for DON released 300 prints in the whole country and prefers releasing the prints to the multiplexes which bring in better numbers than the single movie halls.
I'm hardly surprised when movies these days easily make 40-60 crores within the opening weekend.
Anyways, if they did not increase the price of the ticket, PVR will have to shell out a bigger number to the distributor else run the risk of not opening the movie in their halls! Instead they chose the ever-ignorant movie buffs to pay up a little extra to maintain their bottomline.
Its all in the numbers baby!
Next time, you want to watch a movie, ask yourself if you need to see it in the theatre or would a VCD for 30 rupees will do :-)
@Hyperbole: Hmm, a lot of gyan on how the movies work. Thanks!
So you got more gyan on how the ads in the theatres work? Why they show them? why 5 mins sometimes and 40 some other time? what's the logic? etc.
@theanalogkid: in case u didn't get the drift, i was talking about how worthless it ALL is.
dconstructing to bare essentials, as hyperbole put it - its 30 bucks for a cd or 180 for watever.
@ajishnu... dint realise that a large in fuga is worthless.. :))
@theanalogkid: if u the rich kid on the block, den it dfinitely ain't, man...
but if u aren't, 500 bucks for 60 ml...man, u can't even smell 'good times' with dat quantity, can u, let alone feel it...
:-)
hmm.. the first time i took my parents to PVR the show started 50 mins late.
no announcement of "sorry we are facing.." blah blah, no free snacks as a token of apology, nothing.. we even missed the first 10 mins of the movie coz they didn't wait till after everyone was "in" the movie hall.
this other time i wanted to return the tickets for a movie so they could reissue it to somebody else.. and no.. i wasn't asking for a refund.. yet somehow they thought i was trying to get them to do a favor to me!
will i stop going to PVR? sadly, no. will i bitch about it? YES.
i am waiting.. for competition.
there is nothing like a beanbag, home theater experience. having the remote is a big +.
you have been tagged to write about the 9 best scenes you have ever seen..
I totally agree with your earlier post ... PVR sucks big time. I should have posted before !! But am totally irritate with the fact that u have gone and changed u r post cos of some ppl who may have other opinions !
I had a bad time with PVR once. There are two booking counters in PVR, one right next to the screens on 5th Floor and one on the ground floor. The usual practice is to go straight to the 5th floor and pick tickets and walk into the hall.
Issue 1: There are "supposed" to be 3 counters within the booking counter, I assume that they are for 3 people to stand and issue tickets. In all my visits to PVR, have never seen the 3 people at the counter. The most I have seen is "one", believe me .. just one person at the 3 member counter.
Issue 2: When I went for another movie the ticket counter with the Knight in shining armor as mentioned above, wasnt working. No mention of that at the ground level, so what happens .. one has to go up the 5 floors and then come running down and check for tickets. Whats worse is that the counters at the bottom are jam packed but hello ... there still is only one Knight in shining armor. I got tickets for a movie that starts at 12 only by 12:30 !!
And PVR Hyderabad still charges 100 bucks on a ticket ... wah re teri maaya !
So much for people who are pro PVR on this post a.k.a. "kshitij". You getting u r attention alrite dude .. but the kinds that a moron gets .. get u r freak on !!
do the Delhi PVRs still have Rs.10 tickets? ;-)
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