PVR INOX’s Aamer Bijli On Oscar Film Festival: ‘The Objective Is Only To Show The Best-In-Class Hollywood Films’ (EXCLUSIVE)

PVR INOX is returning with the Oscar Film Festival this year in its largest and most ambitious edition. It will showcase a curated selection of iconic, Oscar-winning films, including “Sinners,” “One Battle After Another,” “Avatar: Ash And Fire,” “Marty Supreme,” “The Secret Agent,” “Bugonia,” “F1”, and “Sentimental Value,” among others. These titles will be played from 20th Feb to 18th March 2026 across 23 cities in 58 cinemas.

As the Oscar Film Festival is consistently showing growth in terms of audience footfalls every year, Mr Aamer Bijli, Lead Specialist – Innovation, Film Marketing & Digital Programming, PVR INOX Ltd, speaks about the Festival’s success and tells Variety India, “The consumers and the patrons have really shown us that repeated festivals, showcase of certain films, select curation, really make an impact on the typical movie-going consumer. And it's because of them that we keep bringing it back. The Oscar Film Festival actually started all the way back during the Priya days, where we'd only had one single screen. And the objective was only to show the best-in-class Hollywood films. So since then, it's just grown and evolved into the film festival it is today.”

When questioned about how the 23 cities were picked based on the demographics, including tier 2 and tier 3 cities, Bijli explains, “The films are very commercial in nature and ranged all the way from about a 5 to 6 crore film, which is like “Marty Supreme”, “One Battle After Another” and even “Sinners” crossing 7 crores. But also films like “Jurassic World Rebirth,” which have crossed about the 60-65 mark. And then obviously Avatar Fire And Ash, which has crossed well beyond 100. So films like this, due to the commercial nature and the wide variety of genre, have given us faith that although we must have a strong presence in metro cities, like Mumbai, Delhi NCR, Bangalore, we also must target these tier 2 cities because that's where the performance of these films did quite well in their nascent stages, such as Indore, Kochi, Guwahati, Rourkela, Mysore. So it's mainly the films and the nature of the films, and that's what's keeping us having a more widespread footprint.”