Sitaare Zameen Par and India's Struggling Cinema Halls

By SK Abbasuddin

In 2025, when Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan decided to release his much-anticipated film Sitaare Zameen Par exclusively in cinema halls, reportedly refusing lucrative OTT offers worth ₹120 crore from streaming giants like Amazon Prime Video and Netflix, it was seen by many as an emotional homage to collective movie viewing in cinema theatres. But is it merely nostalgia, or should Aamir Khan’s theatrical gamble be read as a profound act of cultural resistance?

Aamir Khan, one of the three Khans who have ruled Bollywood for the last three decades, in a recent interview stated, "I became Aamir Khan because of cinema halls, and their survival is essential." This is not just a sentimental reflection on his past. It is in fact a political statement, deeply embedded in the socio-cultural realities of a country where cinema viewing is no longer a popular civic experience but a classed, geographically stratified, and structurally elitist phenomenon.

To unpack the gravity of this decision, one must move beyond the star economy and examine the state of cinema infrastructure in India. According to data from cinemaprofile.com, as of 2025, there are approximately 6,877 active single-screen theatres across India. However, this number conceals a stark and troubling geographic inequality. South India, with only 19.5% of the national population, houses a staggering 53.6% of these theatres. In contrast, North India, home to over 31% of the population, accounts for merely 11.5% single screen theatres. In Uttar Pradesh, the most populous state with a population of 241 million, there are only 321 single-screen theatres, just 1.33 cinema theatres per million.

These numbers are not statistical anomalies. They represent a spatial-cultural marginalization of large sections of the Indian populace, especially Dalits, Muslims, Adivasis, working-class migrants, and rural communities—who once accessed cinema not through OTT subscriptions but through the social and affordable experience of the single-screen hall.

Renato Rosaldo in his concept of ‘Cultural Citizenship,’ (1994) argues that democratic participation must extend beyond legal-political rights to include access to symbolic and cultural institutions. In India today, the right to cinema, particularly to public, communal, and theatrical cinema, is being rapidly eroded for millions. They are being invisibilized from the cinematic imagination itself.

In stark contrast, platforms like Netflix and Prime Video, with which Aamir Khan declined to engage, cater almost exclusively to urban, upper-middle-class, English-speaking, digitally literate consumers. These platforms reconfigure cinema as content—a privatized, on-demand product, whereas single-screen halls were once public cultural spaces, alive with smell, sound, sweat, and sociality. The shift from the ‘theatre’ to the ‘screen’ is not just technological—it is ideological.

The consequence is a form of cultural apartheid. Consider this; Ladakh, Mizoram, Arunachal Pradesh, and Manipur report zero single-screen theatres. Jharkhand, Bihar, Nagaland, Tripura, all with large populations, have under 1.5 theatres per million. Southern states, by contrast, average between 10 and 20 theatres per million, with Andhra Pradesh at the top. This is not an accident of market forces. It is the result of policy neglect, urban bias, and a failure to recognize cinema as a right and a necessity for cultural inclusion.

From a theoretical standpoint, we may turn to political geographer Edward Soja and his concept of ‘Right to the City,’ where he argues that access to public infrastructures, including cultural infrastructures, is never equally distributed. The vanishing single screen theatres from large swathes of the country are not infrastructural failures alone—they are manifestations of deeper exclusion from cultural citizenship. Marxist geographer David Harvey calls this ‘accumulation by dispossession,’ where we witness dominant digital platforms continue to expand by replacing public cinematic spaces and offsetting the shared experiences of traditional cine-going audiences.

Aamir Khan’s refusal of an OTT release of his latest Sitaare Zameen Par does not make him a Luddite, nor is it a defiant move to stand against OTT imperialism. It is an intervention to save the shared magic of cinema theatres from extinction. It is also on behalf of the culturally displaced. He is speaking to and for those who no longer see themselves on screen, nor in the space where screens once stood. His film is not just a creative act but a political gesture, reclaiming the theatre as a space of community, memory, and representation.

We must also invoke Amartya Sen’s Capability Approach, which insists that true development is not merely economic growth but the expansion of people’s freedoms to achieve valuable ‘functionings’—such as accessing art, culture, and public media spaces. By that logic, the disappearance of cinema theatres represents a contraction in human freedom and cultural opportunity.

Cinema, in this framework, is not just a medium of entertainment, it is a form of empowerment, and its denial is a form of systemic inequality. Aamir Khan’s latest decision for a theatre-only release of Sitaare Zameen Par is undoubtedly an astute business strategy to bring in the crowds back to the cinema halls again. But at a time when OTTs are reconfiguring the cinematic landscape for a privileged few, Aamir’s strategy can be seen as a counter-hegemonic intervention. He is staking a claim on behalf of the many, those for whom the cinema hall is not mere luxury, but a collective shared space of dreams, community, and representation.

References

Cinemaprofile.com. (2025). "India's Active Single-Screen Theatres and Population by State/UT."

Statisticstimes.com. (2025). "State-wise Theatre Access and Cinema Infrastructure Report."

Rosaldo, R. (1994). "Cultural Citizenship, Inequality and Multiculturalism." Cultural Anthropology, 9(3), 255-267.

Harvey, D. (2008). "The Right to the City." New Left Review, 53, 23-40.

Sen, A. (1999). Development as Freedom. Oxford University Press.

Khan, A. (2025). Interviews with Film Companion & NDTV. "I owe my career to cinema halls."

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Sk Abbasuddin is a Ph.D. Scholar in the Department of Mass Communication at Assam University, Silchar. His research focuses on media geography, subaltern cultural spaces, and the transformation of cinema infrastructures in India.