Did you read that big Ad on almost every news paper saying “Blue collects 100 Crores in revenue”? And, more importantly did you read the same movie’s review on any newspaper or website? Quite contrasting. Right? Call it a normal phenomena or astute strategy but this has surely taken toll on almost every new Bollywood release! These days movies are known not by their general reviews but by how much collections they are able to make at Box-office.
I have even seen Directors and Actors trying to prove critics wrong by telling them numbers. I saw one interview of Akshay where he assured “Who says ‘Chandni Chowk to China’ is a flop? The movie was able to recover most of its expenses.”. Now, who cares about that? Whether you are making money or not, if viewers don’t like a movie how can it be called a hit?
Moreover viewers understand that making money (recovering) has become really easy these days for Producers of the Movie. The real loss has to be borne by Distributors of the Movie. Also, due to multiplexes and simultaneous overseas releases most of the movies recover their money during first two weekends only! That means even before the verdict is out for any movie, chances are that it may already have recovered its costs (or in some cases have generated profits too). But does that mean the movie is a HIT?
Let’s first understand what is a hit movie and what’s a Blockbuster Movie. As per Wiki “Blockbuster, as applied to film or theatre, denotes a very popular and/or successful production.” and for Hits “When a film made on a low budget is particularly successful or exceeds the expectations of the films in its genre, then those films might be considered by some as blockbusters as well, in the original meaning of the word. However, the Hollywood film industry generally does not consider them blockbusters and instead just calls them ‘hits’.”
That means for any big budget movie, it can’t be considered as hit until it fulfills the great expectations of huge mass. “Blue” can’t be considered as a movie which should be called a hit if it covers it’s production cost. For a movie which is made for more than 130 Crores the expectations are huge and the definitions of “Hit”, “Super hit” or “Blockbuster” changes for such movies. For e.g. “A Wednesday” was only able to generate some 40 Crores but still it was a super hit, based on the fact that production cost was very less and there were no great expectations with the movie.
What do you think? Is it fine that producers use such dubious methods to attract viewers? Or you think that our junta is smart enough to not fall prey to such fake strategies?