By Surendra Bhatia
There may be merit in evacuation of an area where a tornado is expected to strike but do these concepts apply to cinemas in Bollywood too? Apparently, they do.
Chhichhore was merrily on its way in the fourth week, having collected Rs. 22.55 crore in its previous week, when it was rudely snapped off most of the screens to make way for the tornado — namely, Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff’s War. Similarly, Dream Girl was also enjoying a dream run extended into the third week, having pulled in Rs. 38.60 crore in its second week, when the call of nature hit it — Dream Girl too was called off from screens where it was doing very well to clear the decks for War.
Does it make sense at all?
The collections of Chhichhore in its third week and of Dream Girl in its second week were still very good; in fact, their collections in these weeks were almost as much as their entire production cost, indicating that they still had much to offer and that the clamour among audiences hadn’t ceased. Besides, these are films released without overpowering promotions, which usually result in saturated release and maximum collections over one or two weekends. Films like Chhichhore and Dream Girl grow in power as the word of mouth spreads, building their way up the ladder day by day. It may not be incorrect to say that audiences had not had enough of these two films when their runs were truncated because of War.
In the olden days, which means about two-three decades back, Bollywood used to hesitate to cut short any hit film’s successful run. It was considered bad luck for the incoming film to push running films out of cinemas to take over the screens. Now, apparently, it doesn’t matter.
So, the collections of Chhichhore and Dream Girl will take a massive dip in the following weeks, for no fault of their own, and definitely not because audiences have had enough of them but because Bollywood doesn’t have any space for them, now that War had to be released. Thankfully, both have done well enough to cross the Rs. 100-crore mark though the regret will always be that they were meant to climb higher but couldn’t.
War is, obviously, responsible for this push-off-the-cliff of Chhichhore and Dream Girl but it would be churlish to blame it. It is a big-budget film, having spent Rs. 150 crore, with a huge spend on promotions, and it needs to recover Rs. 100-crore-plus in its long opening weekend, or it would be in a financial soup. It can magnify its collections with optimum exposure on a maximum number of screens. Whatever production houses of Chhichhore and Dream Girl might feel about being peremptorily aborted from cinemas, those additional cinemas are a matter of life and death for War too. Its only path to salvation is through saturated release and massive collections in its opening days. It doesn’t have the luxury of slowly building up its kitty over the next three-four weeks. If it adopted the release strategy of Chhichhore, War would have to be in cinemas for the next 10 weeks to just break even.
Besides, War is Aditya Chopra’s production, and its release date was set months back. Aditya must have locked up cinemas weeks earlier to ensure that War did not lack screens when it released. It would be unfair to expect him to let go of cinemas just because a couple of small films had performed unexpectedly well at the box-office. He has his office to take care of; it can’t even be called ruthlessness, knocking off two small films for War, since Aditya had pre-claimed the cinemas much before the release of Chhichhore and Dream Girl.
One part of the release strategy of any film is to leave the space for a big film on either side of the release week. For instance, now that War has released, no big film is scheduled to release the following Friday because it is expected that War would continue its victorious run, and hence a sufficient number of cinemas would not be available in its second week for a new film. Similarly, Chhichhore and Dream Girl released three-four weeks before War to ensure that they could have a decent run before the big film took over. However, both the films performed so well that they had to run well past three-four weeks into the release date of War. That seems to have caused the problem. Had the two films not done extraordinarily well, they would not still be running in cinemas that War had pre-booked.
But that is the name of the game. It is immaterial how successful War is in cinemas, whether it proves to be a tornado or not; for Chhichhore and Dream Girl, it is already a tornado, having uprooted them off the ground with its power. It would be only in the fitness of things that War proves to be a thunderous hit and makes up for what the industry has lost through the aborted run of Chhichhore and Dream Girl.
