Demands of the market place

TODAY, market forces seem to be playing a different game than what the producers, distributors and exhibitors have been accustomed to in carrying on their business. If Yash Johar is making a film worth Rs 30 crore, he can’t think of selling his film even for Rs 5 crores per territory. If Yash Chopra’s Mohabbatein is going to rake in more than Rs 20 crores per territory, then the business of films has gone so high that there is no justification in distributors insisting that it takes three years to recover their investments.

The entire business patterns are changing so fast that all the three sectors have also to think fast in order to cope with the changing times. Whoever knew that Anupam Kher would be offered Rs 8 crore for anchoring Sawal Dus Crore Ka? Why should Manisha Koirala stick to her commitment to work in Ramu’s Kannada film, when at one go she is offered Rs 5 crore to appear in 26 episodes of the same Sawaal... show? Why would Amitabh Bachchan reduce his price when he is being offered a whopping sum for appearing in a television show? There is big money for big names. Neither the producers nor the distributors have to think small in in any way when it comes to films as well as television. If there was no money, the big prices offered to Amitabh Bachchan, Anupam Kher and Manisha Koirala would not have been there. With several corporate houses making entry into the film industry and many big producers trying to corporatise with IPOs fetching good money, the game of film business has taken a different twist. No industry in the world can boast of grossing a revenue of more than Rs. 50 crores in two weeks as Yash Chopra’s Mohabbatein has grossed from India and abroad.

An all-woman cast
SONY Pictures Entertainment’s Charlie’s Angels released by Columbia has knocked out the daylights of the men at the US box-office, with a $ 40 million opening. A film with an all-woman cast, film with Lucy Liu, Cameron Diaz and Drew Barrymore playing the big screen version of the 1970s TV crime thriller in Columbia’s Charlie’s Angels, which will be released in India backed by a lot of events and marketing campaign. The film, due on December 15, will be dubbed in Hindi and Tamil and Telugu. According to the review in Variety magazine, the film is packed with action, attitude, skin-tight costumes, dazzling smiles and slow-motion hair flips for a season’s worth of tooth paste and shampoo commercials. “This entertaining confection possesses the substance of the TV show, the pace of an Hong Kong actioner and the production values of a James Bond thriller.”

With a somewhat younger equivalent of the cast that Bond films reliably draw upon, the Sony film should appeal to teenage girls and boys who may keep coming back for more in theatres at home.

‘Big’ is in short supply
IT appears that there would be a shortage of big-star cast and big-budget films in the coming months. This is because fewer big-budget films are on the floor and they are taking their own time for completion. The second reason is that saleable stars are busy with their own home productions and as such cannot spare enough time for outside productions. The statistics show that there are hardly 200 pictures on the floor out of which hardly 40 films are big-budget ones with big star cast. All of them will take a year to complete. Only towards the end of 2001 these big-budget films will be released. Till then, the release of big-budget films will be hardly one film per week. This scarcity will definitely give an edge to distributors to bargain with the exhibitors to either show the films on percentage basis or give advances before showing their films in the theatres.

MSM Desai

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