Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry (48 page)

In my conversations with members of the film industry, the impact of multiplexes was not only articulated in terms of narrative-aesthetic practice, but also in terms of audience imaginaries. Multiplexes were attributed with expanding the base of theatrical audiences, drawing people in who never used to patronize movie theaters. Shyam Shroff explained that after his company’s first forays into exhibition, which involved renovating an existing cinema and a joint venture in building one of the first multiplexes in Bombay, “Suddenly we saw a kind of audience that never used to visit cinemas because of the condition of cinemas. You realize that there is a totally new audience—the doctors, the engineers who never went to cinemas because they thought it’s all bad and they always hired a dvd, vcd, or vhs cassette” (Shyam Shroff, interview, January 2005). Producer/director Vikram Bhatt reiterated similar sentiments about the effect of multiplexes on the class composition of the industry’s audiences:

I reminded Bhatt that a similar narrative about socially elite audiences returning to theaters was produced in the mid-1990s, after the successes of
Hum Aapke Hain Koun!
and
Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge
, and asked him what was different about this contemporary moment. He responded by asserting that audiences in the mid-to late 1990s were only coming to theaters to see big-budget films with popular stars by well-known directors, whereas with the advent of the multiplex, films without well-known stars made on a smaller budget were able to draw audiences. He said, “Now the audiences are coming back, and if your film is even halfway decent, you can do a decent amount of business in the multiplex.” Bhatt’s remark about a “decent amount of business,” or Shyam Benegal’s relief at having smaller theaters, points to how the measurement and understanding of commercial success have been transformed with the advent of multiplexes.

Bhatt described this new audience as a more cosmopolitan and cinematically literate one, which posed new challenges for filmmakers in terms of genres: “With the coming of the multiplex, an audience which is very exposed to foreign films has come into the theaters. So, let’s say the films that we used to make for the overseas market, that has come to India, so what that means is that action films don’t do well, because if you’ve got an action film then you have to compete with a
King Kong
or a
Terminator 3
showing in the same multiplex, so you have to be better than that, and Indian films don’t have the budget to be better than that” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). Bhatt’s reference to “the films that we used to make for the overseas markets” has to do with the perception in the film industry that only certain genres of films are successful among diasporic audiences in the
Overseas Territory
. By stating that a similar sensibility has developed within India, Bhatt attributes a convergence of tastes between certain audiences in India and those abroad as a result of the multiplex. He believed that love stories were going to continue to be popular and he predicted that “emotional films, thoughtprovoking films, sci-fi, and futuristic films” were all going to become regular industry genres.

Additionally, according to Bhatt, the audience frequenting multiplexes was also perceived as less socially conservative and more open to themes
that in earlier eras would have been regarded as taboo. In that sense, the distance between the sophisticated sensibilities of filmmakers and their more conservative audiences had disappeared for Bhatt: “The target audience is more the filmmaker now; by that I mean, first we used to say things like ‘I don’t think this will be accepted in India,’ but that has changed, because the audience is now very mature, very educated” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). For filmmakers, the advantage of such an audience was that they were much less constrained in the types of stories and themes they could make films about than in the premultiplex past. Bhatt cited the production and exhibition of two recent films that had homosexual characters as a sign of the audience’s maturity and ability to accept unconventional subject matter. He even surmised about
Lamhe
, “I feel that Yash Chopra made
Lamhe
a little early. If he had made it today, it would have been a big hit. At that time it was still a single-screen age, and he was thinking multiplex. If he had made
Lamhe
today and released
Lamhe
today, it would have been a big hit, because the audience [doesn’t] find anything wrong with someone who is in love with the mother, the mother died, and now the daughter is there, so big deal. I mean, you have
Rumor Has It
, which has just released here [United States] in which you have the same man sleeping with the grandmother, mother, and the daughter. It’s okay; it’s fine” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). Leaving aside the fact that when
Lamhe
was being conceived and produced in 1990, the concept of multiplexes was nowhere on the horizon in India, Bhatt’s statements are in line with others discussed in earlier chapters, where media infrastructure like video, satellite, and now multiplexes, produce a discursive environment and provide a vocabulary to discuss social change.
¹⁵
Lamhe
’s commercial failure, which was cited by many in the industry, including Bhatt, as a sign of Indian audiences’ moral conservatism, is recast as a problem of temporality rather than of the immutability of kinship codes. The basis for Bhatt’s judgment about
Lamhe
is founded upon the culturally indexical interpretation of the box-office outcome of the Hindi and Hollywood film, which allows him to reflect on the changing social mores of one segment of the Indian audience.

As a result of these new audiences and their new tastes and sensibilities, Bhatt asserted that multiplexes had transformed the way filmmakers conceived of and marketed their films to distributors. He pointed out that English titles for Hindi films were
de rigueur
for a multiplex audience and a cursory review of titles of Hindi films since 2006—
Gangster,
36 Chinatown, Tom Dick and Harry, Life in a Metro, Welcome, Singh Is King,
Partner, A Wednesday, New York, Luck, Do Knot Disturb, Wake Up Sid, Blue,
3 Idiots, My Name Is Khan, Karthik Calling Karthik, Kites
—indicates the rising popularity of English for film titles. Bhatt explained that from a film’s conception, filmmakers discuss whether a film is a multiplex film or a single-screen film and that categorization extended itself even to titles. He narrated the experience of one of his films, where its content and style was more apropos of multiplexes, while its title connoted single-screen theaters, producing a dissonance that he felt led to its poor box-office performance:

Bhatt’s explanation for his film’s poor commercial performance is an example of how filmmakers make sense of the uncertainty of box-office outcome. In this instance, the advent of the multiplex enables new sorts of
production fictions
, such as the significance of a film’s title for its success, within the film industry.

Bhatt’s discussion reveals the operation of a new audience binary within filmmakers’ discourses about audiences—multiplex versus singlescreen— that has basically supplanted the dominant classes/masses binary. An issue of
Film Information
laid out the distinction between the multiplex audience and single-screen audience: “A marked segmentation of the audience for Hindi films is being noticed these days. There is one section of the audience which likes what is known as ‘different cinema,’ but there’s another which is still fond of the cinema of the ’80s and ’90s; The former section may be loosely referred to as the multiplex audience, whereas the latter can be termed the single-screen audience” (“Why No Universally Appealing Film” 2009). Although the above remarks posit a distinction in taste and cinematic preferences between audiences, locating those distinctions within the spaces of the different types of movie theater, in reality, both sites contain nearly the same programming. Whereas their multiple screens enable multiplexes to screen
a larger selection of films, the films that are exhibited in single-screen theaters are also exhibited in multiplexes. The main distinction between the single-screen theater and the multiplex theater is not necessarily the films that are screened, but in the class composition of their respective audiences.

When I went to Bombay in the summer of 2006 and visited a number of multiplexes, I was most struck by how they were all screening exactly the same big-budget mainstream Hindi films and mostly the same mainstream Hollywood films.
¹⁶
I had come across comments in the Indian press about how initially the multiplex offered a space for filmmakers who did not conform to the conventions of mainstream cinema, but that was a short-lived period and in the words of one journalist, “Size matters. When a Yash Chopra production or a Hrithik Roshan vehicle comes along, it floods the multiplex screens and blanks out the smaller releases” (Chatterjee 2006). Rashesh Kanakia of Cinemax explained that their programming was in sync with the release schedules of the large producers, acknowledging that lesser-known filmmakers would have difficulty in obtaining screen time, unless they had well-known stars in their film. He said, “If the movie is not very big then they have trouble in exhibiting the film because they don’t get a good slot then. We’d probably give them a matinee show” (Kanakia, interview, May 2006). Therefore, despite being touted as an agent of narrative and aesthetic change in filmmaking, the multiplex’s significance also emerges from its role in transforming filmgoing practices and the industry’s audience imaginaries.

Film Information
’s review of the film
Wanted
, the Hindi remake of a blockbuster Tamil film, released in September 2009, utilized the new audience binary, which still carried the traces of the older one:

Certain features
of
this review are familiar, such as its use of audience categories like “masses,” “front-benchers,” “ladies,” and “family,” which are a standard part of the film industry’s audience taxonomy, as well as its assertion that the masses “adore” action and violence, which other segments of the viewing audience find distasteful. It also expresses a certain level of disdain for films produced by the southern Indian film industries. What is different, of course, is how the single-screen cinema seems to have been emptied of its “classes” audience,
at
least at a discursive level, despite the continued existence of differential ticket rates at the single-screen theaters. What is distinctive about this review, however, is that the benchmark of assessing a film’s commercial viability has shifted from the masses to the classes. While the previous chapter discussed how trade analysts were always assessing whether a film was too “classy,” and therefore limited in its commercial potential, in the above review, the apparent mass appeal of the film is posited as the limiting factor. Here, pleasing the multiplex audience appears paramount for a film’s commercial success. This concern for whether a film would appeal to audiences who frequent multiplexes more than a mass audience who attend singlescreen cinemas has to do with the changing economics of film exhibition. The next section discusses how the advent of multiplexes has restructured the relationships between exhibitors, distributors, and producers, which has had an impact
on
how filmmakers define commercial success and how they relate to their audiences.

According to a variety of reports carried out by a number of global consulting firms,
¹⁷
in 2009 multiplexes comprised about 8 to 10 percent of the total exhibition sector in India, but accounted for anywhere from 35 to 70 percent of box-office revenues.
¹⁸
Vikram Bhatt explained how these new economics transformed the way filmmakers conceived of their films and audiences, referring to films made in the mid-to late 1980s: “You know films like
Coolie
and
Mard
[Man] and all those other films a few years back—they were hugely mass-y films, but there are no returns to that anymore. So, you know like a 30 percent full theater in a multiplex gives you what a 60 or 70 percent single-screen theater does, so it’s better off going the classy way” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). This disproportionate share of revenues was due to significantly higher
ticket prices, rather than increased rates of occupancy—noted in Bhatt’s comments about the commercial equivalence between a minimally populated multiplex and a two-thirds full single-screen—since average occupancies at multiplexes ranged from 27 to 43 percent between 2007 and 2010 (Shah and Boob 2009). Bhatt proceeded to give me a more specific example of the inordinately large revenues that could be earned from multiplexes: “I was sitting with Ratan Jain, the producer of
Main Hoon
Na
[You Can Count on Me] when his film released.
Main Hoon Na
’s first three-day collections, in two multiplexes of Bombay, was seven and a half
lakhs
[750,000 rupees] in one, and six and a half
lakhs
[650,000 rupees] in the other multiplex. I’m talking about two screens [and] close to thirteen
lakhs
[1.3 million rupees], and in Punjab the first three days was twelve
lakhs
[1.2 million rupees]; all of Punjab with the single-screen theaters! So he’s better off making. . .
Main Hoon Na
, let’s remember was a mass-y and classy film, so we’re talking about full houses even in the masses” (Vikram Bhatt, interview, January 2006). Bhatt’s comments about uneven box-office earnings reflecting the disproportionate power and value of smaller numbers of multiplex audiences mirror sentiments articulated earlier in the chapter about the commercial importance of overseas audiences, which buy tickets in dollars and pounds, versus Indian audiences buying in rupees. From Subhash Ghai’s description of the overseas market—“the quantum of audience is less, but the quantum of money is more”—to Bhatt’s equation of multiplex audiences being worth twice as much as those in single-screens, the driving commercial logic of the film industry since 2000 is characterized by an inverse relationship between the numbers of viewers and the amount of revenue; in other words, filmmakers have been striving to make more money from fewer people.