The owners of Bangalore’s Victory cinema have decided to do the impossible. They will screen Yash’s Toxic: A Fairy Tale For Grown-Ups on zero terms from tomorrow.
With the producers unwilling to accept percentage sharing terms and with Victory not at all keen to screen the film on rental basis, the cinema announced that looking to the craze for the film, they had decided to screen the film from tomorrow (26th August) without charging anything. It may be mentioned here that Victory cinema had offered KVN Productions and Monster Mind, the producers of Toxic, the same terms which it offered to all other films in recent times. However, the producers insisted that Toxic be screened by the single-screen cinema on rental basis. The logic of Victory cinema stemmed from the point that if the revenue sharing terms are found acceptable for other films, why should they not be acceptable to the producers of Toxic? It may be mentioned here that Victory did not screen KVN Productions’ Jana Nayagan a few weeks back because of the same disagreement over revenue sharing terms. But the case of Toxic is different because the craze for the Yash starrer among the public is almost unprecedented.
According to the owners of Victory cinema, their phones haven’t stopped ringing because their patrons were worried about whether the cinema would screen Toxic or not. Why, their website crashed twice in the last few days because people were logging in to find out if the film would make it to the cinema screen or not. That’s when they decided to do the unprecedented: screen the film, but charge nothing. They will remit all the gate collections to the producers without keeping a single naya paisa out of the net collections.
Victory cinema of Bangalore treats its patrons above everyone else. For Victory, the cinema is because of its patrons. The cinema has never accepted advertisements for playing — neither at the start of a film nor in the interval. What’s more, the cinema has never charged its patrons convenience fee for booking tickets on the website. All the 505 seats are charged a uniform rate. That’s because, the cinema has “never put money ahead of the audience”.
According to the cinema, “A film, at its core, is a work of art. Commerce comes second — it always has. We know what money can do, and we know what it can not. We have no difficulty at all in placing the audience above money.”
The cinema concludes: “Let this be clear: this is not a new way of doing business. It is a one-time answer to something extraordinary — a city that asked for a film in numbers we could not ignore.”
