Baahubali cranks up the Bollywood engine

In the first half of 2017, a dubbed Telegu mythological sequel turned out to be the biggest Hindi blockbuster. Is it time to rethink the formula?

The Hindi film industry finds itself at an interesting juncture: Two of its most anticipated films for the year, starring actors Shahrukh Khan and Salman Khan, namely, Raees and

Tubelight, have overwhelmingly underperformed at the box office. Keeping the industry’s flag flying were two small-budget films Badrinath

Ki Dulhania and Jolly LLB. The biggest boost though came from the Hindi dubbed version of Baahubali 2.

With over ~500 crore in box office collections Baahubali 2 accounted for almost half of what Bollywood notched up in the first six months of 2017. The top six films in this period collected ~1,128 crore at the box office, a 112 per cent growth over last year’s ~530 crore from the top six films then. In fact, Baahubali’s collection alone is as much as the combined collection of the top films from the first half of 2016. Costing Dharma Productions around ~95 crore in rights acquisition and distribution, the Hindi version of the film raked in 437 per cent return on investment for the Karan Johar-led production house.

There is a striking similarity between the box office performance of films in the first half of 2016 and 2017. The highest grossing movies in the two periods are not products of the Hindi film industry. Last year, the highest grosser in the January-June period was Disney’s The Jungle Book which made around ~110 crore from its Hindi dub. To treat

Baahubali 2 as an aberration in the Bollywood story could therefore be a myopic view of the industry. “The big difference that

Baahubali has made is that it has absorbed the below par collections by movies like

Tubelight and Raees. Both films were expected to cross ~200 crore, and by the looks of it, even Tubelight (still running in cinema halls) may not be able to do so,” says a film analyst.

Still the industry is drawing some consolation from the fact that 2017 is turning out to be a better year for it, if one sets aside the performance of dubbed movies. Without taking into account the collection by the Hindi dubs in both years, the 2017 box-office performance for Hindi films is better than last year. The return on investment (RoI) at the box office stood at 102 per cent in H12017 as compared to 75 per cent in the first half of 2016. The top five films of the first half this year, barring

Baahubali 2, earned an RoI of 103 per cent.

While 2016 did boast of some extremely profitable low-to-medium budget films like Neerja (RoI of 280 per cent), Kapoor and Sons (RoI of 108 per cent) and Baaghi (RoI of 117 per cent), it suffered because of the no-show that SRK’s Fan turned out to be at the box office. Housefull

3, the only ~100-crore film from Bollywood last year, lost out because of its huge cost of production.

There is a near unanimous agreement among movie makers and studio officials that Bollywood would gain immensely from cost rationalisation and that is perhaps why producers are pushing for a more rational approach to film-making. In 2017, there seems to be an attempt to keep costs under control; bigticket releases in January,

Raees and Kaabil were made with moderate budgets. The only big-budget film to release this first half was

Tubelight, which failed to make an impact.

“Unlike last year, this year both Raees and Kaabil were home productions of the lead actors. So it helped absorb the biggest cost of the film, its lead talent. That has had a positive impact, since the box-office collections of these films, had they been made at the cost that a

Fan or Housefull 3 were, would not have ensured their profitability,” says another trade pundit.