Blame it on the IPL cricket matches or whatever but the first quarter of 2010 has been dismal for the Hindi film industry. Frankly, it would be wrong to actually make IPL the villain of the piece because the wickets of films have been falling like nine pins even before the cricket matches started in March. Yes, the Indian Premiere League cricket matches can be held responsible for the fact that no big film has been released since it started and because big films take big initials, their chances of success are at least perceived to be more.
But frankly, IPL or no IPL, the films that have hit the screens since the year started have been of the kind which were expected to make it to the flop list. While many were quite trashy and, therefore, couldn’t even complete a week’s run at the cinemas, there were some which failed because of their high prices. In other words, some big films flopped in spite of grossing good collections because their grosses were lower than their astronomical costs.
The quarter gone by will be known as the quarter in which the maximum number of films had to be discontinued from cinemas in the middle of the first week itself. Films have been flopping if they have been bad, ever since they began to be made, but such failure is a rarity! After all, what’s a film worth if it can’t complete even seven days at the box-office?
Actually, while watching some films, one wonders why they were ever made. Their star cast is pathetic, their scripts are ridiculous, their making is sometimes worse than that of television serials. There’s a whole breed of new filmmakers who’ve descended on Bollywood like Jadoo descended on Earth in Koi… Mil Gaya. Only thing, these filmmakers are clueless about the jadoo that makes films click. They are only in search of someone or some corporate who would fund their stupid ideas and in case koi mil gaya, they lose no time in churning out trash that, therefore, comes off cinema screens no sooner than it is put up for public consumption. With a lot of producers (mostly new) and corporates being clue- less about even basic requirements to make a commercially viable film, the obvious happens – they end up funding projects which should never have been conceived, leave alone backed, completed and released. One doesn’t need to give examples of such films because there have been numerous of them in the last three months. In computer language, such films would be referred to as ‘GIGO’ or ‘Garbage In, Garbage Out’ – if you put in garbage (as script), you will get garbage that comes out (as film).
