A web of entertainment
Panipat may not have been the exact film for Ashutosh Gowariker in terms of the box office, but the film is doing excellently well on the web platform it is streaming as the audience is sitting at home and binge-watching during self quarantine.
“Panipat garnered over 3.4 million viewers during its first telecast on Zee Cinema in the last week of February, but it premiered on Netflix earlier and has now been bingewatched. It is a spectacle and the audience wants to sit and watch these big spectacle movies such as Panipat as well as Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior on Hotstar. Both Panipat and Tanhaji are films that are films on the wars Marathas fought and, apart from the new lot of web-series that have dropped on the OTT platforms, these big spectacle films are really doing well,” says senior film historian and writer, Imtiaz Baghdadi.
Even older shows like The Family Man, Sacred Games, Made In Heaven and
Mirzapur have seen heavy traffic in the past few days, the experts reckon .
The newer lot of web-series which are available free of cost on YouTube is also doing rather well — Happily Ever After, Operation MBBS, Minus One and Wrong Number to name a few.
“Once the situation gets normal, all those people who have been forced to watch TV or web platforms are surely going to shift a lot more to the web-series and get into the habit for the next few months at least, and that may not really augur well for the films to come,” Baghdadi warns.
—Sanskriti Media