If you write a negative review for a new film, you either ‘belong’ to the camp of a rival star or are a frustrated soul who can never appreciate anything good. And if you write a positive review, you have to be a paid stooge of the producer, director or star of that film. Social media has an army waiting to be set in motion no sooner than a review of a journalist/reviewer/trade-analyst is out in the public domain. Members of this army will pounce on you as if you have committed the biggest crime of the day by commenting on the film. The honest reviewer? Who’s that? He’s long dead! You may be doing your job as a film reviewer or critic or trade analyst to the best of your ability and integrity — just as you had been doing it in the past, but no, now that there are social media sharks waiting in the sidelines, you have to be pronounced “fraud”, “liar”, “frustrated soul”, “chor”, “paid reviewer” and even worse.
Agreed, many such frauds have entered the field of film journalism after the popularity of social media, but how does that make the existing journos frauds?
What’s equally appalling is that even if your review is correct (box-office collections match your verdict, in case you are a trade analyst and have, therefore, reviewed the film purely from the point of view of the public and the box-office), this tirade against you will not stop. It will deteriorate further where the producer/studio or star of the reviewed film or rival producers/directors/stars will be sucked into the social media tamasha, with insinuations that they have a deal with you and have paid you money to write a good/bad review. In the alternative, the box-office figures will be refuted.
Film trade magazines (there aren’t too many left) have a network of film representatives who keep feeding them (magazines) with daily box-office collections of films. So they have a well-oiled machinery to keep them abreast of the day-to-day collections, but how on earth does this army of good-for-nothings get access to box-office collections for them to comment that they are wrong or inflated? What exactly is their source of information? Zilch, actually.
But does anyone even care to know? Do people understand that film business is a very serious business? How many of these faceless commentators on social media even know the difference between gross and net collections, between net collections and distributor’s shares, between an average film, a commission earner, an overflow film, a semi-hit, a hit, a super-hit and a blockbuster?
Why just these losers on social media, even a trade analyst, who’s been in the business for more than 35 years, wondered aloud in his LinkedIn post on the sixth day of Saiyaara, by which day the film had collected Rs. 155 crore-plus already, if the love story would stop at Rs. 300 crore! Really? One wonders what he had been doing for the 35 years if he doesn’t even understand that if the film has netted Rs. 155 crore in the first six days, it is almost a certainty that it will touch or surpass the Rs. 300-crore mark in just two weeks. So what did he mean when he remarked that it would probably cross Rs. 300 crore in its lifetime?!? The dim-witted guy actually tried to build excitement by asking his followers whether it would end its run at Rs. 300 crore. One distributor of the film was livid at this trade analyst’s post because, according to him, he was harming the interest of the film in the guise of disseminating the latest information. The analysts’s was like the classic case of the TV channel, which had in the last but one LS elections predicted in its exit polls that the BJP would win around 275 seats, and then patted its own back when the party won 400 seats by saying, “Look, we had predicted victory for the political party!”
If someone were to ask me to write serious stuff on the share bazaar, I would never venture into that simply because I am not qualified to comment on such a serious topic. But maybe because films are a source of entertainment, people feel, they have the right and the authority to comment on them. They conveniently forget that what they are commenting on are not the films but on the business of films, for which they have no qualification. Since there is nothing as accountability on social media, these jokers vanish into thin air when proven wrong — which is, most of the times.
Why only social media? Even reputed newspapers and magazines are indulging in this game of mud-slinging. The only difference is that because they are in the business of media and have a ‘reputation’ to guard, they do it more cleverly. Take, for instance, Saiyaara. Everyone and his cousin, aunt, uncle, mother, father, son, daughter, girlfriend, boyfriend, husband, wife… is aware that Ahaan Panday and Aneet Padda’s film is a blockbuster which is raking in the moolah like few films in recent times have done. But what do these two national newspapers do? Write articles on whether the film is a genuine hit or it is just PR hype to prop up an ordinary film as a blockbuster? Really? Is it so easy to project a flop or an average film as a super-hit? Common sense should tell these so-called journalists that if it were so easy, why is only Aditya Chopra or Mohit Suri doing it to prove that Saiyaara is a runaway hit? What prevents the other producers and stars from doing the same thing? Where then is the need to work hard on scripts and shootings because you can ‘make’ hits out of flops, right? What exactly do such newspapers gain by writing such misleading articles? Is it so difficult to accept a film’s success?
Box-office figures are sacrosanct and the only objective way to measure the acceptability of a film among the paying public. No doubt, there are some stars and producers who have acted with so much callousness that they have, to some extent, eroded the sanctity of the box-office as a measurement of the success/failure of films because of the practice of corporate/block bookings. Such stars and producers have recklessly purchased tickets worth crores of rupees, of their own films to show a far rosier picture of their films’ box-office takings than it actually is. But that does not mean that the entire industry indulges in this repulsive practice. Anyway, all that these journalists need to do, before vomitting such nonsense in their columns, is to visit eight or ten cinemas in their city and experience for themselves whether Saiyaara is a hit or not. Is it so difficult to watch the film and decide for oneself whether or not the audience are with the flow of the story unfolding on the screen? Perhaps, for such pen-pushers, sparking a controversy, questioning even the most obvious state of affairs, and creating doubts in the minds of their readers is true journalism. One newspaper has actually published what ChatGPT and Grok feel about Saiyaara in support of its theory that the film may, after all, be more hype than hit!
God save this world!