Komal Nahta, one of the leading trade analysts in the country, exposes Bollywood?s tendency to brag about box-office numbers
Would your neighbour tell you how much he earns?
Would you want to share the details of your father/son/daughter/sister/brother?s emoluments with your acquaintances? Obviously not, right?
But the film industry people are a different species! They take great pride in revealing figures ? no, not just the 36-24-36 type but also the box-office collections of their films. No other industry is so blatant about making its earnings public, but film producers dole out the box-office collections of their films unabashedly. Why, hoardings go up soon after every big release, announcing that the film has netted so many crores of rupees in so many days. The aim is to boast about the box-office performance of the film, to create an impression that the film is the best thing to have happened to mankind since the advent of talkies.
Why, you would ask, are film people not hesitant in letting you in on what should actually be information which nobody except themselves and the income-tax department should be privy to? Because it is believed that in the case of films, the more you yell, the more you sell. After promoting their films, producers start publicising the stars given by reviewers, critics and trade analysts to their films, in advertisements carried in leading newspapers. Once that medium of promotion is also exhausted, the next is to shout from the rooftops about the box-office performance of their films. There is no conclusive evidence to prove whether knowledge of box-office revenues affects viewers? choice of films and if it does, how much it impacts audience attendance.
It is this belief that has driven producers to even lie about box-office collections. Since the actual box-office revenues are available to only the producers concerned and to the distributors who release their film, they resort to unfair practices like fudging figures with a view to misguiding the trade and the paying public alike. Of course, no producer can hope to change the public perception of their flop film by inflating the box-office collections but strangely, some do even that. It is not rare to come across producers increasing their box-office revenues by many crores, just so that the trade and public believes that the film in question has hit bull?s eye when actually, it has bombed at the turnstiles. But while such attempts are generally scoffed at by the trade and even the intelligent public, the practice of producers to paint their film a bigger success/hit/blockbuster than it really is often goes undetected. For example, almost every producer has now made it a habit to inflate the first three days? collections by a few (make that, many, in some cases) crores of rupees. The maximum fudging happens in the first three days because the maximum collections are generated in the first weekend. Often times, the producer turns cent per cent honest after lying on the first three days because of three reasons ? he has inflated collections as much as he needed to, in the initial days; since collections decline after the first weekend, it becomes difficult to tweak them after that; by the first weekend, he has proven what he may have set out to prove i.e. that his film will touch the Rs 100-crore mark or the Rs 200-crore mark, or that it would turn out to be a bigger hit than the previous biggest hit, or the like.
In fact, disgusted by the tendency of producers to inflate their collections, Aditya Chopra, who was one of the first producers to go public with the personal information of box-office grosses, had decided against doling out collections to the media and trade. His logic was that while he was honest in his revelations of box-office figures, other producers gave out incorrect figures in a bid to ?better? their films. Of course, Chopra has now started publicising the revenues of his films all over again.
Actually, the maximum ?adjustments? are made in the box-office figures of Mumbai circuit. The collections of the other circuits are generally more transparent, but the Mumbai territory, because of its sheer vastness (it includes Mumbai, Thane, part of Maharashtra, part of Karnataka and the entire state of Gujarat), lends itself to more fudging than any other circuit.
It is a shame that no independent agency to track all-India box-office collections exists in India, like there are tracking agencies in Hollywood. For, if there was even one such honest and independent agency, the gullible public would not be misled by fake figures. But in the absence of this, the fake drama goes on. But even the public has now become smart; they know which journalists to trust as far as box-office grosses and net collections are concerned. About the rest of the journos, the aam janata knows that they are also fake. very much like the fake collections they publish/air/tweet.