"'3 Idiots' grosses Rs 315 cr in 19 days" (http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/news-by-industry/media/entertainment-/entertainment/3-Idiots-grosses-Rs-315-cr-in-19-days/articleshow/5437995.cms) spooked me. How could there be so many idiots across the world!!!! The movie freak in me who loves Akshay Kumar movies and who is an ardent admirer of the package that is Shahrukh Khan (people who know me well enough would obviously call it an understatement) just could not accept this piece of news at face value. Got me thinking it did. Does the collections of a movie truly reflect the success of the movie? Do the collections figures widely quoted across the various forms of media get entirely to the producers? Well....a bit of research and possibly this is how the various players in the movie industry rake in the moolah :
Producer - The producer charges a minimum guarantee fee before the movie in return for film rights in a territory within the country. Producers can recover up to 30 per cent of the cost of the film, pre-selling it to distributors. If the movie does well and the distributor recovers his money, any additional inflows get divided between the two. We are talking exclusively of ticket sales and do not include satellite rights, music rights and so on.
Distributor - They offer an MG fee to the producer to book a territory. And spend on print and publicity on which they take a 20 per cent commission. Any overflow of revenue after recovery of the MG fee and commission is divided between them and the producer.
Exhibitor - The old system in which distributors paid a rental to the theatre irrespective of whether the movie ran or not is rapidly becoming history. Under a new system revenue gets shared between theatre owners and distributors. Generally, in the first week of a release, the split is evenly 50:50, in the second week the producer gets 40 per cent and the exhibitors the rest, in the third week the producer makes 30 per cent and if the movie continues into the fourth week, he gets 25 per cent of the collections.
Coming back to original agenda of pushing 3 Idiots off the pedestal, lets get to the list of highest grossing bollywood movies ever.....and much to my dismay...i find 3 Idiots perched right at the top with gross collections of Rs. 157 crores followed by Ghajini with collections of Rs. 115 crores. The top 30 grossing movies features 7 SRK movies, 6 Aamir Khan movies and 4 Akshay Kumar movies. Amongst the producers, there is no doubt as to who leads the pack. Yash Raj Films with 5 out of the top 30...not bad eh!! No other producer has managed more than 2....
But guess what all the above figures were not adjusted for inflation....the highest grossing movie ever after adjusting for inflation ....hold your breath....is Sholay with an adjusted net gross collection of Rs. 162 crores....followed by Mughal-e-Azam and Mother India.....One very interesting statistic which strikes me is while the unadjusted highest grossers included 4 movies from the 1990's and 26 from the next decade which has apparently come to an end (am still confused about how a decade could be over in 2009!!)....Once you adjust collections for inflation, you have 4 movies from the 1990's and 7 movies from 2000 onwards which means 19 movies released before 1990's would have been topping the charts in terms of collections had they released today.....!!! Also vindicating my point...no Aamir Khan in the top 10 of this list...SRK with DDLJ and Salmaan Khan with Hum Aapke Hain Kaun are there though....
This just confirms what one suspected all the while. The resetting of records has to be taken with a pinch of salt....a lot of it has to do with the scale of production as well....the number of prints which are released is possibly a very important determinant. 3 Idiots released with a record 1892 prints across the world...To say that Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham released with a paltry 635 prints..
Possibly we need to change the way we judge the success our movies achieve....Having said all that, one must give credit to Aamir Khan who takes so much pain for each of his movie.....Come this February...i expect ET to carry this "My Name is Khan grosses all time highest collections"!!!!
This just confirms what one suspected all the while. The resetting of records has to be taken with a pinch of salt....a lot of it has to do with the scale of production as well....the number of prints which are released is possibly a very important determinant. 3 Idiots released with a record 1892 prints across the world...To say that Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham released with a paltry 635 prints..
Possibly we need to change the way we judge the success our movies achieve....Having said all that, one must give credit to Aamir Khan who takes so much pain for each of his movie.....Come this February...i expect ET to carry this "My Name is Khan grosses all time highest collections"!!!!
Dude...two things...
ReplyDeletePlease give references ...I hope the general inflation is not used... as then it will be doing injustice to the early releases.
2nd i feeel that the measuring the gross revenue generation should not be the criteria for judging the success of films from different era... (now how we define the era is also questionable.. leaving this point for later..) there are many points i liked to mention..
1.The population have increased phenomenally
2. There is trend of releasing movies across different parts of worlds. this makes a huge difference in revenue collection especially for films with bigger banner
3. Cost of movie distribution and commission percentages have increased.
4. Cost of making movies have increased many folds..
So basically revenue takes care of income side bubt we are ignoring the cost side of movie. So in my views a combination inflation adjusted profits and number of tickets sold should be a measure rather than just gross revenue. I know there are fallacy in proposed model also but atleast its better than the gross revenue and still a quantifiable indicator.
Sankalp