At the time, he had just screened a restored version of G Aravindan’s Thampu (1978) at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Renowned film archivist and founder of FHF Shivendra Singh Dungarpur first thought of a Bachchan retrospective around June this year. “The benchmark occupancy for the exhibition industry hovers between 32-35%,” said Sanjeev Kumar Bijli, Joint Managing Director of PVR Ltd, “and the average occupancy numbers we’re seeing are 63% for Deewar, 58% for Don and 51% for Namak Halaal.” Across 22 cinemas and 19 cities, the numbers make a solid case for exhibiting older films more regularly. In videos circulating on Twitter last week, you can see audience members dancing along with the outsized man on the screen to the song “Khaike Paan Banaraswala” from Don (1978). However, the recent success of the retrospective of Amitabh Bachchan films, curated by the Film Heritage Foundation (FHF) and PVR Cinemas, raises the question of whether this is an idea we can explore in India.

Soderbergh was obviously speaking through his first-world lens, where the process of locating a film’s rights is relatively more transparent than in India, and where film archiving is a more elaborate and concerted effort. “All these big theatre chains have the ability to turn themselves into repertory cinemas in which they screen films from any period of the last 120 years for audiences who’ve never seen them in a theatre,” he told The Daily Beast.

In late 2020, when most movie theatres in America were running empty and Warner Bros controversially announced their entire 2021 slate would simultaneously release on HBO Max (their streaming service), director Steven Soderbergh made a suggestion that seemed almost radical at the time.

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