This cinema was established by Jagadish Choukhani. His father, Babulal Choukhani, had migrated from Rajasthan to Kolkata and established the Bharatlakshmi cinema. Later it was renamed as Prabhat. Navina had a huge compound in front, which was taken by the state government for road widening. Navina's screen measured 52 ft, 3 inches by 25 ft by 5 inches. It originally had 1103 seats. There was a food counter in the lobby upstairs. Initially, Hindi films were screened there. Deewar (1976), Trishul (1978), Don (1978), Muqaddar Ka Sikandar (1978) ran very successfully at this cinema. All hell broke loose during the screening of Muqaddar Ka Sikandar. To control the crowd, there are stories of Jagadish having to make a hilarious move. Babulal was a film producer and a lot of film costumes were still available. Carrying a toy gun in his hand, Babulal had come out of the theatre donning a cop costume and threatened to shoot if the unruly crowd didn't disburse. That was the kind of craze that Navina enjoyed in the late 70s. Deewar and Muqaddar Ka Sikandar had run for 100 days. The turning point happened when Madhuban and Malancha opened. Jagadish then decided to shift from screening Hindi to Hollywood movies. That was the only theatre in south Kolkata that used to run only English movies. Only cinemas in central Kolkata used to run English movies back then. Navina was the only outlet for running English movies in south Kolkata. Jaws (1975) was the first major Hollywood movie to be released there. The Bond film - A Spy Who Loved Me (1978) - was simultaneously released in halls in central Kolkata as well as Navina. Before that, the trend was to first release English films at the halls in central Kolkata and later, at Navina. No Hindi films were screened at Navina then. This trend continued till 1992. In 1988, Jagadish's son, Navin, had joined the business. Politically, the scenario had changed for import of Hollywood movies. Rationing of importing Hollywood movies was introduced. There were restrictions on the number of prints imported too. Non-resident Indians were given license to export films to India. But, they hardly had access to good studio movies of Hollywood. That kick-started a trend of so-called 'NRI movies' that were primarily soft porn. Navina was left with no option but to screen the few Hollywood movies available and the 'NRI movies'. This affected the profile of the crowd that came to watch movies. In 1992, Navina shifted back to screening Hindi films. Salman Khan's Ek Ladka Ek Ladki (1992) was the first Hindi film to run at Navina after this decision was taken. Getting good Hindi movies was a challenge for Navina since the existing cinemas of south Kolkata already had a stronghold there. Slowly, the things streamlined. Navina started running both Hindi and some Hollywood movies, including Titanic (1997) and Jurassic Park (2012). Movie buffs have stories of how Sanjay Dutt's fans had queued up the night before the bookings started for Khalnayak in 1993. The moment the counter opened, all tickets for 21 shows of the film were sold at one go. When Karan Arjun released in 1995, Navina again witnessed another craze. Two fan clubs of Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan had assembled in front of the theatres. First they started to beat drums before literally coming to blows in front of the cinema. To the dismay of the management, they hurled crude bombs at each other. The management was on tenterhooks wondering what the members of these two groups would do inside the theatre. Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge also saw fans staying up all night outside the cinema in October 1995 to buy tickets for the Shah Rukh Khan movie. This trend of screening Hindi movies continued. The next big change in Navina happened with the screening of Rituparno Ghosh's Bengali film, Antarmahal, in 2005. That was distributed by Venkatesh Films. This started the trend of screening Hindi, Bengali and English movies at Navina. The current number of seats is 821.