Do you really follow the trade of
the Indian Film Industry? If you watch all the movies purely for entertainment
and know which one worked or not, OR if you meekly follow the trade analysis of
the movies of your favorite stars, reading ahead might be deemed preposterous
for you. If you do not care about either of the things mentioned above, save
yourself from this blasphemy. However, if trade analysis and trends in the
industry make sense to you, I merely posit this article as an invite to
voraciously discover the sugar and salt that comes with newly acclaimed 100 Crore
Club in the Indian Film Industry.
The 100Cr Club is a continuously
successful (well, until now), devouring yet charming black hole formed by a
bourgeois lot of superstars aka actors that extract unprecedented collections
for their movies leaving a lot of trade analysts aghast. Really, how big is the
Indian movie market if a movie goes onto earn up to a 100 crores in a week?
Where were all these people before? Were they not watching movies ever? Have a
lot more people started watching movies now? Or is it just the movies of these
stars? Is it a good or a bad trend for the industry? For the quality of cinema?
What do critics say? Why do the 'supposedly' intelligent crew of journalists
and filmmakers guffaw and grind this club more often than not? Why do a lot of
people tear it apart as a droll syndrome continuously promoting banality in
films?
There have only been a few films
till now that have entered this club when it comes to collections based out of
Indian Box Office purely, as ‘trade analyst’ (barely a critic) Komal Nahta points
out here. The top
10 out of them are, in ascending order of the number of days it took them to
enter the club post their release, Bodyguard, 3 Idiots, Ra.One, Dabangg,
Agneepath, Ready, Don 2, Ghajini, Golmaal 3 and Singham. Shahrukh, Aamir, Ajay,
Salman and now Hrithik are the only members of this club with their success
rate being 2/4, 2/3, 2/15, 3/4 and 1/5 respectively. Succinctly, its the 3
Khans who have been calling the shots, if we consider a period of 2008-2011
disregarding Devgn because of his lower success rate. Saif Ali Khan and Akshay
Kumar are the only two stars of the older generation who haven’t made an entry
into this club, while Hrithik Roshan made an early entry than any of his
counterparts (for instance, Abhishek Bachchan). The newer stars like Ranbir and
Imran are yet to disrupt the flight of this unfettered lot. Joginder Tuteja
points out here how its upto Saif and Akshay to enter the
club this upcoming year with their upcoming projects and predicts that no one
else would be able to enter it yet due to the audience's predilection towards
the present members. Honestly, the article is demonstratively low reasoned and
staggeringly perpetuates the star system in the industry.
While a lot of trade analysts can
rest in their smugness in the never-fail-formula of the top stars, there are
many others who continuously deride this club and its members, pummel their
movies and anything that associates themselves with this bandwagon. The main
reason for their despise is that movies with minimal content are entering this
club just by milking out the market value of their stars. I agree with them, to
a larger extent. After much contemplation, serious comparisons and fighting denial,
I could only pick 3 Idiots to have entered any sort of elite club, if there
existed one for decently good movies. I enjoyed watching Don 2, Agneepath and
Singham but they still did not deserve to be in the club. And I am saying this
based on their overall cinematic value for me, which consists of at least some
author-backed entertainment and its treatment without too many glitches. All
other movies mentioned here are prosaic and positively enclosed in what is superfluous.
There could be many other movies that I would have wanted to see make it to
this list but that’s not how it works in the industry. Many actresses would
have hoped to have a heroine driven script to be here to but no, we are a
sexist audience. The closest contender actress has been Vidya Balan who has
been allowed to reach Rs 80Cr with The Dirty Picture. The hatred against this
club stems from the continuous success of bad films, the audience's continuous
affection for them and the everlasting wistfulness for one great film to make
it to this club. Even the ones I picked are not the greatest.
But is the audience really in
love with these films or is it just the stars that draw the crowds? As of now,
it has become a race, a race where the horses are not trained to play on their
strengths and leave it on fate, but they are obsessed with their perpetual
entitlement to a spotlight which can only be achieved by outdoing each other or
just yourself, at times. As Aniruddha Chatterjee points out in his very
relevant article here, only 3
films in the last four years have earned at least twice as much as their first
week's collection, when their lifetime collections were taken into account. We
strictly do not have a repeat audience, so its definitely not the quality of
films that produce these results. There is nothing like a word of mouth for a
movie. The last movie that worked on word of mouth was Band Baaja Baraat and
yet it does not have any milestone tag attached to itself. The theatrical run
has been limited to the first week which pretty much decides a movie’s lifetime
collections and it rests in its entirety on star power, a system that has
plagued the industry since its inception and is almost impossible to get rid
of. It is rooted deep beneath the rigorously burgeoning markets of Indian
movies and the big numbers that are pouring in. Even the overseas markets have expanded
unprecedentedly and churn out numbers which have never been seen before, though
the order of collections may not be the same as mentioned above.
How fair is this system, if it goes on?
Numbers fetched by Bodyguard in the first week explicitly show that the market
has definitely expanded and but do more people really watch the movies now and
more so in the first week itself? A well-reasoned musing over the Indian cinema
market reveals that the market has expanded because of the large number prints
released for all big movies and the luscious hiked ticket prices associated
with them in the multiplexes. A 2nd tier city before used to get the
print in 3rd or 4th week but now even in a remote village
a Bodyguard gets a release on Day 1. Multiplexes run more than 10 shows a day
in most places for all major releases with bewildering ticket prices. Both
factors, once multiplied ensure that the opening day or weekend garners huge
figures. A lot of times the collections are misattributed to more number of people
watching these movies. As a matter of fact, 4crore people saw Maine Pyaar Kiya,
3crore saw Gadar but 3 Idiots was seen by only 1.5crore people in theaters and
it is still the highest grossing film in Indian history. The nauseating
publicity associated with every big movie creates a sense of emergency that
deludes the audience to flock the theatres as soon as its release, within the
first week itself.
Honestly, the audience does not
seem to care, leaving a lot of people shockingly bemused. Behind this
overwhelming side of the industry, there are thousands of upcoming directors,
screenwriters, technicians, journalists and bloggers who are struggling day in
and out to insert meaning into cinema, some to do the formulas their way and
some to create new ones. But it does not matter to a common cine-goer if they
ever get out of this routine rigmarole of battling the demands of studios,
barely financing their dreams and producing content that changes the blinding
course of this system. It is futile to underscore here that a rising number of
people in our cinema going audience is only besotted by puerile entertainment,
as can be seen from Golmaal 3 collecting those amounts. A lot of them want to
savor their favorite star as he does the undoable. The more publicized movie is
enshrined as a better movie, completely ostracizing the strength of the script
or the lack of it. Some of them want to see a movie to chide and berate it by
ludicrously pitting it against any Hollywood movie. Will such an audience care
about a rare film produced from the searing passion of an independent filmmaker
or a Stanley Ka Dabba which even got a mainstream release?
So what happens now? We revel in
the exhilaration of the collections and gape at the numbers or we wait slyly
and run it down on all social platforms hoping that this bubble would burst
someday? The point is we cannot aspire a devastation of the star system with
the way this industry and our audiences are structured, unless of course the
world ends in 2012. A Salman or a Shahrukh release gets manifold the number of
prints a film like Stanley will get. With the increasing profits, it provides a
bespoke chance to the studios and production houses to be pluck. It is only
when the big production houses stop lobbying to the stars or the
uni-dimensional factor of movie economics, and start caring about the creative
side of each film, that they will risk half a shot with a more earnest and
innovative film. This, by no way means a compromise on the entertainment
quotient provided by them because I still feel that cinema is meant to
entertain primarily and enlighten secondly. More prints for better films will
ensure that they market it more too, irresistibly in the greed to get fancy
returns for their investment. There will be a few hiccups but the strategy but
the higher flow of money should allow them to do so as they meticulously model
the strategy by through lingering on trial and error and a little nuance to the
audiences brought in by different city tiers. However, the trash films will
still make it to the elite clubs of Box Office collections due to their star
value, glaring marketing strategies and ridiculous number of prints, but I
guess it will still be fairer than what we have now. The trends are changing,
albeit slowly. Getting an independent film to reach out to the audience is
easier than it was before. Many production houses and multiplex chains are
coming up with smaller focused divisions to cater to all kinds of cinema and
get them a release. Yet, the race does not seem to end. Maybe we will stop
brooding and find solace in this perennial race too, with time, when a film
with no stars is allowed to compete as an equal too. Until the dawn strikes, we
will have to wait for Salman Khan’s next release!
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