Changing Sense of Business in Bollywood..

There were times when we use to hear from our parents that Mugal-E-Azam ran for 25 consecutive weeks at a particular cinema hall....

Films that of Rajesh Khanna, Raj Kapoor,Rajendra Kumar, Manoj Kumar, Dilip Kumar would run for weeks and weeks House Full!!..Then only the costs of the Producers were able to be recovered..

A Producer or a Production House, as we like to call these days, invest some amount of money going upto 50-90 Crores these days into films. Its just like an invest made by a Entreprenuer into a Venture out of which he wants some returns. Film get released and the proceeds from the ticket sales, distribution rights, music rights, etc make up for the returns for the Producer.

This Cycle used to be very long and the gestation period was also long in the till the early 90's and even the films like DDLJ(Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge) and Hum Aapke Hain Kaun had to run for several weeks just to recover the costs involved in the project. There were several reasons for this, the Volumes part wasn't there and only around 100 -200 prints of the film were released in one go as compared to the 1200 - 1500 prints released these days.

One couldn't even think of buying a ticket priced @ Rs 175 - Rs 250 for Sholay in 1975 or a matter of fact for a DDLJ or a Mugal-e-Azam. This shows the changing sense of business involving the pricing strategy of the tickets.

Sholay and Mugal-e-Azam were made in a budget of around 1-2 Cr but at the same point of time the collection figures have been phinominal @ 250-300 Crores. With the advent of the Satellite Television and Radio, the music is also sold in Crores. This was 1st done by the Showman Subhash Ghai for Taal in 1997 and the music was sold for stagerring Rs 6 Cr.

These days new ideas are being formulated for the promotion and the marketing of the film in the national market as well as the international market with the increase in the Indian Population worldwide, a different class of audience is present for the consumption of the final product. Brand Endorsements are done and promotion of the films are done using all the possible means including electronic,print & visual.

I would like to say with the increase in the Corporatization of Bollywood and more money inflows, the range bound Hindi Films in terms of content and presentation are exploring new avenues and have been succeeded in that. This is shown in films like Rang de Basanti, Dhoom 2, Chak De India, Bheja Fry, Khosla Ka Ghosla, Page 3 to name a few...

The films these days manage to recover their costs within the 1st week of its release with a large part of it coming in from the international markets, distributors, satellite rights, music rights and so on!!...

Its Showbiz where we always say "The Show must go on but Show me the Money Honey!!...."