COMING SOON
With cinemas operating at full capacity again, producers and studios are announcing release dates for the blockbusters they have been sitting on for the past year
Film studios are starting to announce release dates for their blockbusters
SHIBASISH SARKAR, GROUP CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF RELIANCE ENTERTAINMENT, was one of the many Bollywood studio executives to keenly follow the daily box office collections of the Tamil film Master. Starring the industry’s two popular actors—Thalapathy Vijay and Vijay Sethupati— the drama since its release on January 13 has collected over Rs 150 crore domestically, with an additional Rs 100 crore worldwide. The figures were impressive given that until February 1, cinemas in India were operating at 50 per cent occupancy. “It has given oxygen to the Indian film industry,” says Sarkar. “Its success proves that audiences are hungry for outdoor entertainment experience.” Ever since the Centre permitted cinemas to operate at full occupancy, the focus is on Sarkar who has held on to two of Reliance’s prized assets—the Rohit Shetty-directed Sooryavanshi with Akshay Kumar and Kabir Khan’s ’83 which restages India’s maiden World Cup title.
For exhibitors, the two Hindi films are instrumental to revive the badly hit theatrical industry, one of the last businesses to reopen fully. Sarkar is hopeful that they will be able to release one of the two films during the Holi-Good Friday period in the last week of March or early April with the second scheduled for June. But the official release date will come only after he has reached an understanding with distributors for his biggies made on an estimated budget of Rs 200 crore each. “We have been sitting with the films for the past year and the cost and commercials have gone for a toss,” says Sarkar. “We have lost so much that we are no longer in a place to take
advantage of the situation.” Since cinemas reopened on October 15, 2020, only a handful of films managed to lure audiences back to the big screens—Tenet and Wonder Woman 1984 in multiplexes, a few Bengali titles such as Dracula Sir during Durga Puja in West Bengal and Ravi Teja’s Krack in Telangana and Andhra Pradesh. The business was muted as cinemas ran on old releases and producers opted to release small, independent films. Master then became the ailing industry’s beacon of hope. “It turned the whole argument, that customers will take a long time to return to theatres, on its head,” says Kamal Gianchandani, CEO, PVR Pictures Limited, and president of the Multiplex Association of India. “It is just a question of a massive film with a big star cast releasing [to get audiences back].”
Buoyed by Master’s success, producers in the South have already announced release dates for star-driven films [see box]. Bollywood, though, remains cautious. Salman Khan was the first Bollywood star to confirm the release date of his next, Radhe, on Eid, after a consolidated social media campaign by cinema owners to request the actor-producer to save the exhibition industry. Among other big-budget releases, Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chadha will arrive only on December 24, while of the multiple Akshay Kumar releases, only Bellbottom has a release date yet, April 2. Neither Yash Raj Films nor Dharma Entertainment has blocked any dates.
For producer Bhushan Kumar, managing director of T-Series, the wariness stems from the fact that the theatre-going audience in the South is quite different from those in the North and West. (Master earned Rs 138 crore in Tamil Nadu alone.) “They are big movie buffs,” says Kumar, while talking about how crowds jostled to buy tickets for Master in the state. “We [Bollywood] cannot be too excited by Master’s performance. We are worried about the OTT-viewing habits of people.” Kumar in 2020 sold at least three titles to OTT platforms—Chhalaang and Durgamati to Amazon Prime, and Ludo to Netflix—with another one, Bhuj: Pride of India, lined up for release on Disney+ Hotstar, to reduce its backlog. “My inventory is a lot more compared to any other studio,” says Kumar. “Had I not taken the OTT route and waited for theatres
Despite Master’s success in the south, Bollywood remains cautious because of the audience’s OTT viewing habits
to open and the public to return like they did in pre-Covid times, my films would not get many shows in a crowded calendar.”
The battle for holiday weekend dates has begun. There are at least two big clashes: Radhe will vie for the public’s attention along with John Abraham-starrer Satyameva Jayate 2, and October 13 will see the Ajay Devgn-led football drama Maidaan face a formidable rival in RRR,
S.S. Rajamouli’s first film since Bahubali 2.
While Kumar felt it wasn’t an issue and said that audiences “need variety like how they get on OTT”, Boney Kapoor was peeved with Rajamouli as he had locked the release date for Maidaan last year itself. “When the call of the film industry should be to stand by each other...a date clash of two big multilingual films is the last thing that we could expect,” he told a news agency. “We have to give space to each other so as to optimise the numbers.”
The year 2021 will not only see held over 2020 titles, which includes many Hollywood offerings as well, but also a slate of new films, resulting in a crammed release calendar. It doesn’t help that “India is a terribly underscreened market”, notes Gianchandani. India has less than 10,000 screens for a country which tops in maximum releases yearly. And the screen count is only dwindling further post-lockdown. PVR closed three properties, equalling 14 screens, last year. Meanwhile, hundreds of single-screen cinemas permanently ceased operations. Nonetheless, some cinema owners remain optimistic. “We have been saying that 2021 is the year of cinema,” says Rajender Singh Jyala, chief programming officer, INOX Leisure Ltd. “With over 50 titles in Hindi and other Indian languages expected to hit the screens, the industry is poised to see major blockbusters through the year.” Gianchandani declared that “2021, especially the second half, will see business like we haven’t seen in almost a decade”.
Such a scenario is dependent on how producers and cinema owners agree on issues such as virtual print fee, charged by theatres from producers to have their films showcased, and window for theatre-to-digital releases. Master was available on Amazon Prime just 16 days after it hit the big screens, deviating from the traditional pattern of a one-month waiting period for Tamil and Telugu films and two for Hindi. To enable a quick OTT release, Master’s producers waived any theatrical revenue earned after the film released online. Internationally, too, Hollywood studios have cut short the interval between theatre to streaming release. Universal will now have its films streaming online merely 17 days after they hit theatres, while Warner Bros, much to the dismay of US cinemas, will do a simultaneous theatrical and online release. A producer, who chose to not be named, says theatre owners in the South were more supportive and flexible compared to those elsewhere. “There is a fear that people won’t come to theatres,” he says. “If we shorten the window, we get extra money from our digital partners and recover the loss we incur in theatres.”
Gianchandani, though, sees Master as “an exception to the rule rather than the rule, going forward”. He cites the film’s decent showing in Tamil Nadu even after its release on OTT—Rs 2.78 crore in the third week—and says: “It shows the resilience of theatres despite OTT being the more inexpensive proposition.” Meanwhile, Bollywood awaits its own Master to save the day.