It’s a much-needed rebuke to the inexorable swarm of ads that consume the consumer in the theatre. All played twice back-to-back, as if time has rewound.
Feb 22, 2025 07:21 IST First published on: Feb 22, 2025 at 07:21 IST
Time is a form of pure intuition through which we structure our experiences, not a real property of the world, according to Immanuel Kant — and it certainly doesn’t seem to be a real property of cinema theatres. For the Bengaluru man who had to sit through 25 minutes of commercials after the scheduled time for a film to start, time must have crawled at the same pace as the traffic he had to navigate to get there. For the theatre chain, which later argued in court that playing the ads helped to accommodate viewers who arrived late, the film seemed to start precisely on time.
The case was over a screening of Sam Bahadur, which never started with military precision at 1600 hours, in December 2023. A disgruntled viewer approached a consumer court, which has now ordered PVR INOX to pay Rs 20,000 for causing him inconvenience and mental agony, as well as Rs 8,000 to cover the cost of filing the complaint and Rs 1 lakh in punitive damages for engaging in unfair trade practices. The court said, “Each one’s time is very precious, no one has [the] right to gain benefit out of others’ time and money.”
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It’s a much-needed rebuke to the inexorable swarm of ads that consume the consumer in the theatre. All played twice back-to-back, as if time has rewound. The business imperative is obvious, but it musn’t detract from the experience the viewer has actually paid for. That said, the court’s reasoning also says something else about the times we live in: “In the new era, time is considered as money”, and it’s “very hard” for busy people with tight schedules to watch “unnecessary advertisements”. Time is money, and one has to budget very carefully to have any downtime. But when do you get to hit pause?
