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Shubhra GuptaShubhra Gupta

The film industry is looking at the bleakest year gone past, with losses adding up to a shocking Rs 200 crore and only two hits under its belt. Will the next year be any better?

Stills from the films, Raaz

Less than wo months to go for the year's closure, and the film industry is looking at the bleakest year gone past, with losses adding up to a shocking Rs 200 crore. It's a sad count: of the 40 A-grade films released in 2002, only one, the Rs 50-crore `Devdas' was a blockbuster.

`Raaz', made on a less than Rs 10-crore budget doubled its money; the best of the rest made slender margins. All sectors of the industry — production, distribution and exhibition — are in disarray. Canny audiences, fed on a diet of cable and satellite content, are staying away from the movies. The failure of big star-casts has shaken even the biggest production houses. The Yash Chopra backed movie, `Mujhse Dosti Karoge', starring Hrithik Roshan and Kareena Kapoor, faced an ignominious early exit from theatres: never before has the chiffon-and-pearls Yashraj formula tanked so badly. It, along with another Chopra production, `Mere Yaar Ki Shaadi Hai', will be out on Zee TV this month: never before have such recent releases sought a gasp of life on television. Karan Johar will not be out with a new film till 2004. So won't Subhash Ghai. News trickling out from Bombay studios: 2003 is set to be even worse than 2002.When Aditya Khanna, who runs New Delhi's 30-year-old prestigious Chanakya theatre, says it's never been so bad, he is just echoing the industry's sentiments. He likens this crisis to the one in the early 1980s when the newness of TV content, and the video boom, swept away 30-40 per cent of the cinema audiences, and the fallow period of the early 1990s, just before `Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge', and `Hum Aapke Hain Kaun' which saw the return of the audiences. The present cycle began, he says, around October 2000: "we are in crisis mode, and it's being made worse by the bickering among the various sectors of the industry. Everyone is wondering how to survive till Monday." (Friday is the day a new movie releases). A few smart exhibitors will survive, he says, by making sure they run every successful film, ranging from crossover movies such as `Bend It Like Beckham', and `Monsoon Wedding', as well as massy products like `Devdas' and `Raaz'. But how many theatre-owners can manage to acquire even a single money-spinner? It's a rhetorical question: there are no movies left to play.

As a long-time exhibitor, he sees only way out of the mess: to put in place what he calls the `superstar effect', a proven management theory, which will strengthen the base of the pyramid-the exhibitor. The producer sits at the pinnacle; the distributor is somewhere in the middle. The exhibitor is the first point of contact for revenues to "flow back": the viewer buys a ticket, and the cash starts to flow back in various streams to the distributor, and then, the producer. Only when the exhibition sector is strengthened, the superstar — it could be the producer, or the star of the movie — will benefit. The beginning has to be made from the bottom up.

Bend It Like Beckham

He ticks off the major bugbears, which, he says, "have killed the industry". Exorbitant entertainment tax ensures that the exhibitor has nothing left to plough back. The tax structure has forced theatre-owners to jack up rates, which leaves the lower-income groups out of the cinema, but the increase hasn't been commensurate with the over-all increase in expenses to upgrade and maintain theatres. Theatres have been closing down at an alarming rate all through the past decade, and the prevalent trend of the conversion of the larger 1,000-seaters to300-seaters doesn't really compensate. "Let's not talk about the number of theatres, let's talk of the number of seats: if the seats are dwindling, it's going to affect overall collections, and ultimately you will have a situation where the producer is making fewer and fewer movies," he says.

Next on his list is flexibility in pricing, which should logically go with the flow of demand and supply: in the West, what you pay for a morning show is about 50-60 per cent less than an evening show; similarly, the weekend prices are much higher. "The guy who pays, say, Rs 250 on a Sunday isn't being charged extra, his money is going to subsidise the weekday shows. I am, in effect, giving the consumer a choice-save money, and come to me during the week." Commercial exploitation of space is something else that most established large single-screen exhibitors are interested in. The viewer now wants a complete entertainment experience, and allied services like video arcades, fast-food parlours, shops etc: a movie is now just a by-product of the rest of it. Unless an exhibitor is allowed to open up his space, he is going to find it impossible to lure the `walk-in' or the `impulse' customer.

He also touches upon piracy and protection of copyright: rampant piracy and weak implementation of laws have added to the woes of bad product, and bad pricing. And winds up by sounding a big warning for the future, which looks frighteningly empty: "when you are marketing 52 weeks, you need those two big products, so that you can manoeuvre your other products around them. But when you are forced into manoeuvring all 52 weeks, nothing happens." He winds up on a dark note. Hollywood, he says, makes 20 blockbusters a year, because they've got their matrix right: that's something that the Indian film industry has to start work on, without losing a moment, because time has already run out.

The author can be reached at Shubhrag@vsnl.com

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