Hindi Film Businesses are a dime a dozen. A successful Hindi film rarely makes back its investment, and the ones that do last for more than one week at the box office are few and far between. Only 36% of Hindi films ever make back their production budget. Do you know why? And kalpana chawla ka janm?
1. Audience Unbundling
Audiences are different in every country of the world. We love different kinds of films, and we watch them at different times of day. The best Hindi films target an audience that is more than twice as old as the average age of India’s moviegoing population, and is mostly male, but there’s a segment that goes to theaters at all hours to see movies about weddings and relationships. Then there are the children who dominate the box office for any movie that is family friendly.
2. Film Rights
Film Rights: How Do You Get Them? Very few independent filmmakers can afford film rights to make their own films. That’s why you see films for next to nothing on the internet and beamed out of satellite. The only way to get them is to make a film yourself and then sell the rights as a package. If you’re lucky, you can get some very good ones for cheap, but there’s no guarantee you will be able to get your hands on them. Not to mention that even if you do manage to get film rights, the first thing studios do when they hear about your movie is see if they can buy out your distribution rights without paying any money up front.
3. Talent Pay Dividend
There are many people who are willing to do anything for fame and fortune but will still never be able to make it in Bollywood. It’s not that they’re bad actors, or that no one in the industry wants them to succeed. It’s because independent filmmakers get paid very little for the work they do and the opportunities for making money off of their work are very few. In order for them to survive, they have to rely on talent payoffs from producers and stars in order to get them through the hard times waiting ahead of them.
4. Distribution
Finding a distributor used to be the hardest part of making a Hindi film. But with the advent of the internet, distribution has become very easy. You don’t even have to actually go to movie theaters or television networks anymore. You can just put your film online and watch it on your computer screen anytime you want. No one will ever see it, because no one has bothered to go see it in the first place, but once again someone will pay eight figures just for the right to put your film up on their website and watch it whenever they want.
5. Who’s the Star?
The truth is that anyone can be a star in Bollywood. The only thing you have to do is find someone who’s famous and wants to make a film with you, and sell it at Cannes or Berlin. Then make a small film for peanuts that no one will see and watch it die quietly on the internet two years later.
6. Scarcity of Talent
Talent is one of the rarest commodities in Bollywood, but talent isn’t everything. There are dozens of filmmakers who have created huge hits despite the fact that they don’t have a single person on their teams with any talent worth talking about. The reason they can do this is because they always manage to find an actor willing to work for free and then hook them up with some great locations, a great story and an even better music video.
7. Distribution Bottlenecks and Pricing Models
As soon as anyone hears about your film, they’re going to want to put it right into theaters. But if no one is willing to pay for your film, then it can’t be distributed. The truth is that you could spend the rest of your life making great Hindi films but still never make back the money that you need to make your next film. And even if someone offered you money to make another Hindi film, no one would go see it anyway. So there’s really no point in making them at all.
8. Bad Star Power
Bollywood stars are easy to find, but they’re easy to kill too. If you make a film with someone who’s popular, they won’t just get themselves killed by accident. They’ll want their fans to know that they died so it would look like suicide, and then use it in a music video and make even more money off of it than they did before. So basically the only way to survive as a Hindi filmmaker is to make sure your star never gets famous and that you don’t need one.
9. Competition
As soon as a film hits the box office, everyone else is going to try and make the same movie. If you make one that’s any good, it won’t be long before someone else comes along and makes one just as good. So the only way to continue making Hindi films is to either never bother making one at all, or to only make films that are no good at all.
