Ten Ways to Know Movie is Dud at the Box Office.
It starts with an odd news item in print media..About the movie..About the movie’s story or some salacious gossip..And then gradually the swell is created..Promos are cut..Hype is generated..Marketing strategies are evolved..As if it is war out there (Actually it is war out there, if one goes by wisdom of Al Ries and Jack Trout)..To go for a blitz or carpet bombing…To make Charge of the Light Brigade with entire cavalry (Meaning 900 plus prints) or to go for guerilla attack (100 minus prints)..To go for merchandise or serve plain malai!! Tie-ups with channels…Tie-ups with sponsors..Tie-ups just for the sake of tying up! Media partners..Mobile partners..Mortgage partners..Mafia partners!!!After courting so many partners, reasons for partnership are sought.. promotional tools are explored..In-film branding..product endorsements..Billboards, FM radio, Road shows,One for the road!!!! Hard Talk with the Hero..Soft Talk with the Heroine..Direct Talk with the Director..Everyone talking of ‘Hatkey’ role and ‘Hatili’ film…
And then the D Day arrives ! First Day First Show generally seals the fate of a movie..
In rare cases the slide downhill is thawrted and word of mouth creates an upswing…Otherwise ways and means are applied to spruce up the sagging sales(For no movie worth its salt is successful without box-office..Alternate revenue streams are no measure of films success..Straight to DVD or online release can never match the response of live-wire audience bunched together in the blackhole like darkness of a movie theatre..nothing can match that spontaneous community response).
And if response on first day first show is that of a stubborn mule that refuses to budge the entire PR machinery goes into an overdrive to make donkey win a Derby.
Here are the most favored ways adopted by producers, their publicists and papajis to prove a point :
1. By third day ratings appear in the print publicity of newspapers’ entertainment section..Movie is panned by critics and chewed as a paan by cinegoers but ratings appear with one or two lines pulled out from the whole text of some esteemed reviewers trashing exercise and highlighted as the gospel truth..From some obscure site or FM channel a rating is plucked (generally a PR effort) and stars blazoned across the publicity ads..Three star is a tact and four star could be garnered due to a contact.But both are not a fact.
2.Posters appear on walls, sidewalks, telephone junctions, outside Public loos,inside railway platforms, at the back of buses– all having Super Hit printed either in Red or Black on white background.The more desperate ones go for Super-Duper Hit splashed across the posters. Or spray painted on all the walls serving as open public urinals.
3.In trade weeklies full page ads are given by the distributors from various territories congratulating the entire team of a film and its makers for such a stupendous opening..The record collections are cited. So what if a theatre is of 100 seats in some C city and goes full..Generally it is mentioned that the theatre was houseful.
4.First day First show reactions of selective audience is edited and played non-stop on electronic media to create the buzz..Generally the remarks selected go something like: Good movie, Awesome, Fabulous.. Hero has given wonderful performance..Heroine has just given..Wonderful..Direction is too good.(to be true).Songs are fantastic(beyond fantasy).
5. If this does not seem to be working then another promo appears. This time featuring comments from the film fraternity. KJo or Farah Khan,Yash Chopra or Ramesh Sippy is cornered to give their views..If that seems out of reach then any wannabe star is hounded to give his byte..Generally starlets are preferred to provide an eye-candy..And these wantons and wannabes ,after having savoured the hospitality of a premiere show, inevitably make politically correct statements..’I have not seen a better work from a director in recent past(subtext–yes this work is no better than the past one,infact worse)…Movie moves you(subtext–moves you out of the theatre).
6. The news items are plugged into tabloids, dailies,weeklies– where stars not connected with the movie go berserk raving about the movie : ‘I have not cried as much in my whole life(even as a toddler) as I cried in this movie’..’It pulls you’..’There was lump in my throat (as I choked after a BJ)..’It hit me hard (wondering till now a meteor hit, a missile or just remembered mama’s thrashing from childhood).’
7.Collections from all theatres from all prints are clubbed together to give a gross figure mentioned as Rs.3,33,333,33.33…Never a rounded off figure e.g. Rupees three crores or three crores and a half is mentioned.So gross.
8.If driven to the wall the lob is given it is hit in overseas(as if domestic public is moron). And when confronted with figures from overseas that are thin like a receding jet stream, overseas is explained as Timbucktoo, Cuckoo,Fiji aur some fugitive island.
9.When nothing works blame-game begins as audience can’t be trashed..It’s a king..Remember!So in -house blame invariably leads to citing poor marketing and promotion as the reasons for no show.As if all decked out corpse could be made to walk.
10.And tenth way…ummmm…well your guess is as good as mine ?
Anurag Kashyap
Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Verma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Krysh
In a way, its worse down South, especially in my home state, Andhra Pradesh, every flop movie, is praised as a hit, or “not an expected succcess”. The TV channels there, act like the stars PR agents, and try to whitewash every 3rd rate actor’s failures. A sick 3rd rate love story is praised as a sensitive love story, a sad sack actionier is portrayed as The French Connection. So low has the credibility of the TV channels touched there, that people have stopped believing them altogether.
Krysh…thats so true man…all the points…apne,marigold,kaafila, cash n god knows what all movies…tehy did the same. but lot mnay times, it does help..like aap ka suroor.
HAha…
10 could be the launch of VCD/DVD(with extra footage and behind the scene action) of the movie within two weeks of the movie’s release
Phoenixnu,
I think, aap kaa surroor, worked because of Himesh’s popularity among certain sets of audience.
BTW, I agree with each and every point made by Krysh.
Good one !:d
Krysh – great article!
BTW, these are some other sure shot ways of confirming that the film is going to be a flop – even before it is released:
1) It has Sunney deol, vivek oberoi, vivek mushran, arbaz khan, manoj bajpai,jackie shroff or suniel shetty as the solo leading hero.
2) It has riya sen,kim sharma, Koena mitra, celina jetly, preeti jangiani or amisha patel in a leading role.
3) The trailer has more scenes of a comedian ( Johny lever, raju srivastava, etc) than of the leading actors.
4) It is produced by Mukta Arts.
5) Arjun rampal says that he was offered the leading role and didnt do it since he didnt have time.
6) The item number has an item bomb who nobody can recognise. Probably half ukranian-half iranian plumpish blonde.
7) there are corporate placements of ganji-banyan-chaddis- supari/passpass…even in the trailers.
8) the director is an RGV protege.
9) there is a special opening sequence of antara mali dancing to some zany dance steps.
10) your guess is as good as mine…
sophocles