Now that Laal Singh Chaddha and Raksha Bandhan have conclusively turned out to be turkeys at the box-office, it has been underlined that poor content is the biggest problem that currently ails the film industry. However, the boycott brigade would like to believe that it and only it caused the failure of both the films.
That’s not true at all. It is an established principle that a call for boycott, like the one issued in the case of Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha and Akshay Kumar starrer Raksha Bandhan, adversely affects a film if it is not appreciated by the paying public. If the targeted film is excellent, no amount of persuasion to refrain from watching the film helps because there is no accountability. Watching a film is a personal choice and one doesn’t need to announce whether he has seen a particular film and why. Had both the aforementioned films been rich in content, they would’ve worked their magic on the audience notwithstanding the call for boycott, and would have brought in the moolah at the ticket windows. But since both the films failed to live up to expectations, the boycott call did come into play — of course, only to an extent. In other words, the boycott did not cause the films to bomb; because the films failed at the turnstiles, the boycott call may have added a couple of crores to the losses in the case of both the films.
In a way, the producers of both the films should be ‘happy’ that their films did not get glowing reviews from the genuine reviewers and trade analysts. For, such reviews served to inform the world that the films lacked merits. Had the reviews been in praise of the two films, it would’ve meant that two good or great films had been shot down by the boycott brigade. But as things stand today, both, Laal Singh Chaddha and Raksha Bandhan, were not victims of the boycott brigade but rather of bad content.
The boycott brigade would, perhaps, be shocked to know that times are terrible not just for the film industry in India but internationally too. The Coronavirus pandemic has put cinema chains to such huge losses that the second largest cinema chain in the world — Cineworld — is contemplating filing for bankruptcy. If the premiere chain — AMC Entertainment — did not go the same route, it was only because individual investors helped the chain raise more than $2 billion recently. The pandemic has pushed cinema chains to the brink of bankruptcy because footfalls in cinemas have never reached the pre-pandemic levels the world over and also due to lack of money-spinners, and mounting costs and debts.
If the two leading cinema chains in the world can have it so bad, one can well imagine how PVR, Inox, Cinepolis and the smaller multiplex chains in India must be struggling to make ends meet post-pandemic. The proposed merger of PVR and Inox, the two largest multiplex chains of India, is also a sign of how badly bruised cinema chains in India are after the pandemic lockdowns. Calls to boycott films is not making matters easy for them and the lakhs of people whose livelihood depends on such multiplex chains and film production houses.
