A new block buster movie in Bangalore at 50 bucks!

Yeah... this used to be possible about a decade ago during our college days when we’d occasionally go to theatre to watch movies. And then came the malls and multiplexes, replacing the ordinary single-screen age old theatres. With this, rose the cost of movie-watching too. Watching a movie in Bangalore costs anywhere between 150 to 500+ bucks, depending on the day of the week and the movie.

Also the tickets need to be booked in advance. And driving to any of these ‘multiplexes’ which are at least an hour’s drive from home in heavy weekend traffic is a pain in itself.

For people like us, whose weekends are mostly quite unpredictable, planning out a movie-watching program had quite become a saga. We also missed a movie or two since we got tied up in some priority work though the tickets were booked. Due to all these, our movie watching had terribly reduced in the last year - just one movie in the whole of 2009!

We realized this early this year and were contemplating on some of the latest hit movies - Paa, 3 Idiots and so on, trying to decide upon the date and place, when we came across this ‘Venkateshwara theatre’ very close to home. Of course, we knew we should expect a cinema hall of the 90’s, but nevertheless wanted to give a try. So on a Saturday, quite unplanned, we just went in search of this hall in very narrow lanes. The then-showing movie was ‘Suryakanthi’, a kannada recent release. Though the movie was not so great, the cinema hall was pretty decent - for the 40 bucks that we gave per ticket! It did remind us of our childhood cinema halls, but I should say the sound system was not that bad, and the push-back seats were decent too.

Okay, we thought, we can just drop in here 10 minutes before the evening show, even on weekends, and watch some average movies. And to our surprise, the next week, when we were planning to go for 3 idiots and searching through the newspaper for the show timings in Forum, we saw that our dear Venkateshwara theatre was playing ‘3 idiots’!!!

At 5-30, being very sure that we won’t get the tickets for the 6pm show, that too on day 2 of the movie showing here, we still left home thinking we’ll buy tickets for the next day. And to our surprise, at 5-45, there were still ‘Balcony’ tickets available and for 50 bucks each!! And the hall was half empty! For a movie that is costing about 300 bucks in multiplexes, with all the complications, one sixth the amount was a great fair deal! The movie-count for this year is already 2 now, and I’ve decided to keep a watch on all the movies playing here.