Adrian Athique is lecturer in media at the department of Sociology, University of Essex. His research interests include film exhibition in South Asia, unofficial networks of media distribution, new media technologies and the transnational reception of media in Asia – all of these part of a wider interest in cultural sociology, geography and history. Douglas Hill is a lecturer in Development Studies in the department of Geography at the University of Otago, New Zealand. His research engages with comparative political economy, especially in South Asia.

• 1. Situating the Multiplex as a Research Object 2. From Cinema Hall to Multiplex: A Public History 3. Film Exhibition and the Economic Logic of the Multiplex 4. India Poised: Assessing the Geography of Opportunity 5. Location and Lifestyle: The Infrastructure of Urban Leisure 6. Spatial Politics of the Multiplex: An Environmental Model 7. A ‘Decent Crowd’: The Social Imagination of the Multiplex Public 8. Screening The Multiplex. Conclusion: The Multiplex and the Leisure Economy: Future Implications

"This is a pioneering attempt to situate the multiplex not merely as a space of film exhibition, but a space that becomes the arbiter of cultural economy and aesthetic evaluations. Locating it within the larger debates on changing Indian cities, the authors establish how the closed dialectical relationship between the space and those who inhabit it becomes a key negotiation between self and the legitimate other... This extraordinary book must be read widely and acknowledged for its courage to argue against the aesthetic subversion of many publics, their cities, and their film-exhibition spaces by the multiplex."- Akshaya Kumar; Contemporary South Asia, Vol. 20, No. 3, September 2012