Dhoni To The Rescue Again?
Much is expected of MS Dhoni, which traces the life of the man from a ticket collector to Captain Cool, but will its cost stymie its progress?
Contributing to the continuing gloom in industry circle is the failure of Raaz Reboot to enthuse either critics or the audience. While the other release last week, Pink, garnered very flattering reviews and good collections aided by the positive word of mouth comments, Vikram Bhatt’s Raaz Reboot failed on all counts. This week there are six releases but so little is expected of them, the trade is looking forward to the Denzel Washington led The Magnificent Seven to save them.
Another film which makes the much beleaguered exhibition section smile in anticipation is MS Dhoni, which, given the much loved and successful title character is Indian cricket captain Dhoni, and the fact that this film deals with those years of his life not known publicly, makes it a film to wait for. The movie though has been an expensive one to produce. Market sources say Dhoni himself was paid Rs 40 crore for the rights to the story from the Rs 100 crore plus budget. But producers Fox are confident they can recover the cost.
On a related but quite different topic I recently had occasion to have a longish chat with Tannishtha Chatterjee, who is often called ‘the princess of parallel cinema’ for her path breaking work in several international films that have won her and the films accolades all over the world. She recently had two back-to-back releases in India, Unindian and Island City. UnIndian was a rom-com co-starring Aussie pacer Brett Lee and Island City a wonderful NFDC produced film which incidentally is the last NFDC production. In both the films Tannishtha stood out for her performance. But speaking of their release, she was unhappy with the fact that they were given very few shows and that too in the ‘Gold’ class in theatres. Obviously these were not going to be films for which cinegoers would throng the gold class and the result was neither film did anything much at the box-office. She asked why mainstream films tend to block so many screens that Indies had no chance to be seen.
A very valid question indeed for which, sort of regularising the distribution process, there is no answer. Clashes at the box office, especially those by big budget mainstream movies provide fodder for lots of stories as well as endless excuses when one does not do well. The press has already begun writing about clashes at Christmas 2018 and filmmakers have been justifying their stand for all the festivals from now tillthen. Maybe if they spent half as much time on fine-tuning scripts these clashes wouldn’t matter. After all if your content is brilliant nothing on earth can keep a good film down.
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Thumbnail Image Source: twitter/FoxStudios
