PVR INOX, India’s largest cinema exhibitor, has opened the first site under a new franchise-led format called PVR INOX SMART Cinemas, choosing Muzaffarpur in Bihar as the launch market. The four-screen property at Icon Plaza Mall opened on 4 September 2026 and lifts the company’s screen count in Bihar to 11. What matters to franchise investors is not the venue but the structure behind it: SMART Cinemas runs on a Franchise-Owned, Company-Operated (FOCO) model, and the company has already mapped roughly 300 cities where the format can be replicated.
PVR INOX operates around 1,800 screens, almost all of them calibrated for metro and Tier I economics — premium fit-outs, premium ticket prices, premium food and beverage spend. That cost base does not travel well into cities of 150,000 to 500,000 people. Rather than dilute the flagship brand, the company built a second format with a different capital structure underneath it.
The SMART Cinema build is designed to cut capital expenditure per screen by roughly 20–30 per cent through efficient construction methods and a leaner operating template, which in turn supports lower ticket prices and more affordable concessions for price-sensitive audiences. The Muzaffarpur site still carries 644 seats, Dolby 7.1 surround sound and Next Gen 3D — the experience is not stripped out, the cost of delivering it is.
Under FOCO, a local partner or developer funds the build and owns the asset while PVR INOX runs the cinema day to day. For the brand, it converts an capital-heavy rollout into a signature-and-systems business. For the partner, it removes the hardest part of cinema ownership — programming, distributor relationships, staffing and service standards — and replaces it with an operating agreement backed by the country’s dominant exhibitor.
It is the same logic that has pushed hotel groups toward conversion and management agreements across Asia Pacific: the owner supplies the real estate and the capital, the brand supplies the system.
“We have identified 300 cities where Smart Cinema can come.” — Ajay Bijli, Managing Director, PVR INOX
The SMART Cinema launch lands in the same year that international and domestic brands have been rebuilding their India entry models around smaller cities rather than the saturated metros. Segafredo’s master franchise entry and Tony Macaroni’s India and UAE rollout both carry the same underlying assumption: distribution beyond the top eight cities is where the unit growth is, and franchising is how you reach it without carrying the balance sheet.
For a full picture of how foreign and domestic brands are structuring these entries, see our guide to franchising in India in 2026.
Three readings are worth taking from this deal.
First, format segmentation is becoming standard practice. Mature brands increasingly run two or three formats in parallel — flagship, compact, and franchise-only — each with its own capex band and its own partner profile. Investors evaluating a brand should now ask which format they are actually being offered rights to, not simply which brand.
Second, FOCO is quietly becoming the preferred structure for capital-intensive experience categories. Cinema, fitness, entertainment centres and experiential retail all share the same problem: high fit-out cost, high operating complexity. Splitting ownership from operations solves both sides at once, and it is a structure that translates cleanly into Southeast Asian and Gulf markets where mall developers hold the real estate and want anchor traffic rather than another tenant.
Third, secondary-city density is the new scale story. A 300-city map in a single country is a different proposition from a 30-city metro map, and it changes what an area development or master agreement is worth. Investors assessing rights in Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines or Saudi Arabia should be applying the same test: does the brand have a format that works outside the capital, and has it proven the economics before asking a partner to fund them?
PVR INOX has now put a first site on the ground and six more under contract. The next nine months will show whether the format holds its cost discipline once it leaves Bihar — and whether the operating model is exportable beyond India. For anyone comparing structures, our breakdown of master franchise, area development and single-unit rights is a useful companion read.
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