Inside The Business Of Cinema With Lata Jha's Bollywood, Box-Office And Beyond

How has the Indian film industry thrived in the last 100-plus years? Has it advanced technologically and in terms of content? Are creative minds today backed adequately by studios that claim to spend crores to give the audience an artistic thrill? For far too long, Indian filmmaking has been seen just as a pursuit of passion and creative madness. After having turned into a foreign studio-controlled ecosystem over the past few years, though, the industry has seen other forces emerge.

In Bollywood, Box Office and Beyond: The Evolving Business of Indian Cinema, author and film journalist Lata Jha aims to examine these forces in detail—the tussle between multiplexes and single screens and their struggles, and the threat and opportunity that emerging streams of monetization, such as video streaming, pose for filmmaking as we know it.

Here's an excerpt from Bollywood Box Office and Beyond

The movie-theatre business in India is star-driven at present and it is almost impossible for smaller films without known faces to be showcased, industry experts say.
There are small-scale films that grab eyeballs but they have to come with exceptional concepts and word-of-mouth publicity. For a film such as Drive, made with a budget of Rs 35 to 40 crore, Dharma would have to additionally spend at least Rs 8 to 10 crore on publicity and distribution to ensure a decent release in at least 750 screens. It is evident, industry experts say, that the team evaluated the potential of its product and realized that the box-office returns would not justify the investment. However, it is possible for Netflix to have paid anywhere between Rs 20 crore and Rs 25 crore for the same film.

‘The digital space has been a nightmare for content creators like us from a piracy perspective, but it has also given us the amazing power to find our own niches,’ explained Vikram Mehra, managing director, Saregama India Ltd, which runs a movie division called Yoodlee Films, which has released movies such as Brij Mohan Amar Rahe and Ascharyachakit directly on Netflix. This is true for both audio as well as video, Mehra said. If you’re coming out with, say, a folk song, it will be difficult to find a mass audience for it. But with digital, you can even go as micro as talking to two Indians in Namibia or Ghana.

Exhibition experts like Ajay Bijli of PVR Cinemas are quick to warn that taking films directly to digital means letting go of a lot of money by choice. According to several experts, Netflix voluntarily lost out on the huge box office that Martin Scorsese’s $160 million The Irishman could have made by giving it only a limited theatrical release in the US so it could be in the running for the Oscars, and reserving it for audiences of the platform.

In an interview with me, Bijli told me while adding that there would be ‘complete mayhem’ if the theatrical platform is compromised. All the producers and distributors still love the 70 mm screen because they believe this is the harbinger of box-office collections; once you’ve monetized on the big screen and everyone has given their verdict, other windows become more relevant. If it hasn’t released theatrically, typically the consumer would say, ye kaun si movie hai (which movie is this)? I think the smaller movie connects with the consumer as much as the big movie does, in fact, I would argue that smaller movies are doing better these days.

But filmmakers see it otherwise. As Mehra explained, Digital allows you to do that kind of micro-marketing and reach the end consumer far easily. Otherwise, something like selling a CD to talk to two people in Ghana would have been impossible for me. The same thing is true for OTTs allowing me on the video side. Even on television, the prime slots are given to big films that garner good advertising. But digital platforms are not based on appointment viewing and the consumer can avail of it when he wants. Mehra said Yoodlee films are mainstream without big stars. We need stars because in the opening weekend, if you don’t get people, the film will not stay in theatres and the exhibitor will take it off. That’s a fear all of us have as producers. You get stars so that you can pull crowds in for the first weekend and then the film will speak on its own merit. When people like us are making movies that don’t have big stars, it becomes a challenge, he reasoned.

How do you draw people out in that case? Digital comes to the rescue then, the film will stay longer (on the OTT service), the producer has no fear it will be taken off, and there are people who go back and sample it. Even today, people are coming back and telling Mehra how much they enjoyed a film like Ajji (2017), a dark tale of an old woman avenging her granddaughter’s sexual assault.

‘That’s the power of digital that gets unleashed, and it is definitely making things easier for people like us who want to make relevant content which may not appeal to 70 per cent of India,’ Mehra said.

And while Ajji may not be my favourite example of a film that has broken out after its release on OTT, there is no denying that the world has opened up for films that earlier weren’t deemed profitable enough to be taken far and wide across the globe, reaching more people than can ever be accommodated in any movie theatre.

Excerpted with permission from ‘Bollywood, Box-Office And Beyond’ by Lata Jha; and published by Rupa Publications India. You can also join SheThePeople’s Book club on Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram.

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