This link has been bookmarked by 1 people . It was first bookmarked on 20 May 2008, by gibreel ferishta.
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20 May 08
gibreel ferishtaAt some point the men and women running creative businesses start believing that their target audience is ‘people like us.'
This is happening to Hindi cinema. It seems to to be blinded by the Rs 150 an Indian multiplex viewer pays and $7-12 the overseas one does for a ticket. As a result, it is losing out on swathes of the domestic market for films in B- & C-class towns. Not too many of the big hits in 2007, except perhaps for Chak De India! have worked across Hindi-speaking markets. Bheja Fry or Partner, some of the other big Hindi hits, just don't register with small town audiences. Sreedhar Pillai, an expert on the south Indian film business, confirms that this is true for Tamil films as well. If a film works in Chennai, Malaysia, Singapore and (these days) Japan, production companies are not interested in the rest of the state.cinema television telephony bhojpuri multiplexes brand-equity bollywood small-town theatres
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Vanita Kohli-Khandekar: The Bhojpuri plug MEDIA SCOPE Vanita Kohli-Khandekar / New Delhi May 20, 2008, 3:44 IST It is called the ‘people like us' trap. At some point the men and women running creative businesses start believing that their target audience is ‘people like us.'
<script language="JavaScript"> google_ad_client = 'businessstandard'; //google_ad_client = 'ca-businessstandard_js'; google_ad_width = 200; google_ad_height = 200; google_ad_format = "200x200_as"; google_ad_type = "text"; google_ad_channel = ""; //google_color_border = "FFFFFF"; google_color_border = "F7F7F7"; //google_color_bg = "FFFFFF"; google_color_bg = "ffffff"; //google_color_link = "639ACE"; google_color_link = "0253B7"; google_color_text = "000000"; google_color_url = "D63431"; //google_skip = adsenseSkip; </script> <script src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js" type="text/javascript"> </script>This is happening to Hindi cinema. It seems to to be blinded by the Rs 150 an Indian multiplex viewer pays and $7-12 the overseas one does for a ticket. As a result, it is losing out on swathes of the domestic market for films in B- & C-class towns. Not too many of the big hits in 2007, except perhaps for Chak De India! have worked across Hindi-speaking markets. Bheja Fry or Partner, some of the other big Hindi hits, just don't register with small town audiences. Sreedhar Pillai, an expert on the south Indian film business, confirms that this is true for Tamil films as well. If a film works in Chennai, Malaysia, Singapore and (these days) Japan, production companies are not interested in the rest of the state.
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ndia sells a world-beating 3.3 billion tickets a year according to PricewaterhouseCooper's Global Media & Entertainment Outlook. However, since our ticket prices are amongst the lowest in the world, the market remains small and unprofitable. Multiplexes take the average ticket price up from Rs 20 to Rs 150 or $3.5, as film companies like to tell investors. This has prompted production companies to focus only on the Rs 150 audience. So, an entire generation of scriptwriters is churning out, some very good films, albeit for ‘people like us.'
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The fact is a large audience exists outside of metro-India; one that the digital screens being rolled out in thousands are reaching out to. It is an audience that buys Chinese DVD players, rents VCDs for Rs 5 a day and is driving the double-digit growth of cable and DTH. This audience, which earlier consumed a lot of Hindi films, is now increasingly finding its succour in Bhojpuri, Marathi or Bangla cinema.
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Their rough estimates put the box-office gross of Bhojpuri cinema at Rs 500 crore.
That Bhojpuri is filling a gap left wide open and yawning by Hindi films is just being noticed. Reliance Adlabs and PVR now play Bhojpuri films at some of their metro screens
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