Businessman Harry Panday is fervently hoping that come August, the Avinash Entertainment Complex will be among the busiest facilities of its kind in the country.
He is in the process of pumping millions of dollars into a facility, which, by his own admission, is still performing below his own expectations.
Situated at Lots A&B Water street Georgetown the Complex had initially attracted public attention primarily because it was felt to be much too close to the much-maligned ‘Tiger Bay’ area. Panday believes that one of the accomplishments of the Complex is that it may well have been able to at least partially remove the cloud which, for decades, has hung over one of Georgetown’s northernmost residential areas.
Still, he appears unable to put his finger on the reasons why, a year and a half after the first facility, the cinema complex, opened, the enterprise as a whole is still to catch on.
The three cinemas, which opened in December 2012—Cara Nash and a 3-D facility—together accommodate 560 patrons. There were brief halcyon days when ticket sales were 90 and 100 per cent. That was prior to the commissioning of the Princess Hotel cinemas the following year. After that ticket sales dipped disastrously. Today,
