An intelligent person once said, films don’t fail budgets do. Whenever a film Flops in the industry it is not because the content was admired by fewer people, it is because the budget was more than its potential of return.
Every story and film has its own audience and market. A film that is bad for some people might be a great film for others and vice versa. There can be many opinions about a film and opinions are subjective. It is the numbers that make a film Hit or Flop. If your film recovered the business and generates profit for all related (producers, distributors & exhibitors), it’s Hit and if it’s a loss maker then it will be called a Flop. Simple.
From all the above explanation, one thing proves itself that a filmmaker can easily avoid a Flop by controlling the budget to match its potential of return. Let me explain more.
Suppose you are making a film for very limited audience and you know its story will appeal to a certain class. Let’s assume it’s potential of return is about 20 crores. That means you should not keep your budget more than 20 crores. Now to recover that amount you have several revenue sources. You will get money from Theatrical release, Sattelite rights, Home video and Music plus advertisement. In this case even if your film does a 20 crores business at Box Office that will mean a recovery of 8-10 crs and the rest you can recover from other sectors easily.
We’ve seen a series of Flops this year which totally opposed this rule and proved to be epic disasters. But a film named “Ittefaq” released very recently which adopted the clever strategy of saving maximum money and concentrated on returns only. The result is that film is in profits despite collecting just more than 20 crores net in the first week.
Ittefaq starring Siddharth Malhotra, Sonakshi Sinha and Akshaye Khanna had a very controlled budget of 21 crores including Print and Advertisement. The filmmakers(Dharma Productions, Red Chillies Entertainments & BR Films) saved their promotional money as the film had less appeal for masses. They didn’t spend money on foreign locations and promotional travelling so never had any pressure to recover it. The result is, Ittefaq has recovered its investment in just a week as the film has earned 23.65 crores net in its first Friday-Thursday run with a steady trend.
Since the film has been very well made and the content is getting great response, the collections have been steady in first week. The trend is expected to continue in second week too and even if we take a 70% week to week drop, it will add another 7 crores in second week which will make it touch 30 crores mark and from there one it will add another 1-2 crs before closing its run. This is a fantastic result for the makers of Ittefaq and a great case study for others.
We just hope more filmmakers follow this strategy and avoid losses. What are your thoughts?