Bollywood’s facelift

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The workers’ strike, holding up shooting of 40-odd films, may be the last straw, but it’ s anyway been a year of surprises in Bollywood. Big-ticket films (Tashan, Bhootnath) that were slated to do well didn’t, instead small-budget, refreshingly different films (Aamir, Jaane Tu… Ya Jaane Na, Jannat, Rock On!!) stole the show and with the audience showing the way, multiplexes laid down the red carpet for new cinema, be it from the world, Hollywood or Bollywood.

Really, Anurag Kashyap must be rueing the fact that he made Paanch seven years too early. Paanch, a story about five rock stars in the making and their pursuit of success at all costs, got caught at the censors in 2001 and has never been commercially released. But in 2008, you have Rock On!!, a film on a sub-culture like alternative rock music, meeting with box-office success too; you have an Ingmar Bergman retrospective at multiplexes and the response is overwhelming; and for the next Bond film, Sony Pictures’ Quantum of Solace, an unprecedented 650 prints of which are going to be released on November 7.

“2008 has finally confirmed what production houses like ours have been saying for years. That Bollywood desperately needs a facelift,” says Pritish Nandy of PNC. “You cannot be the world’s biggest movie industry and proudly produce so much of trash. Over the past few years, things have been changing. Good movies are coming out, finding screens, finding supp-ortive critics, finding applauding audiences. This is the best thing that could have happ-ened to the industry,” he adds.

But does good content necessarily translate into good box-office? Depends on who you put the question to. Reliance Entertainment’s chief marketing officer Saurabh Varma is pretty pleased with Rock On!!’s theatrical numbers. “The film has collected Rs 35 crore gross (and still going strong) from just the India theatricals itself,” he points out.

If the first half of the year wasn’t very strong for Bollywood—some of the films which fared well at the box-office include Jodhaa Akbar, Taare Zameen Par, Race, Jaane Tu…—all the players are looking to the festival releases like UTV’s Fashion, Ashtavinayak’s Golmaal Returns, Dharma Productions’ Dostana, Mukta Arts’ Yuvvraaj, Yash Raj Films’ Rab Ne Bana

Di Jodi and Allu Arvind’s Ghajini, starring Aamir Khan.