Memo for moviemakers from India’s packed halls
PremiumAs people swarm back to theatres, 2022 may turn out to be a record year for India’s box office. South Indian fare has stormed ahead. To compete, Hindi cinema needs a mass-market edge
It’s finally pay-up time for those who had bet cinema halls would not survive covid. Online apps made hay, sure, but crowds have bustled back to theatres. Box office blocks of seats have been selling in large numbers since January. A report by Group M and Ormax Media puts all-India ticket sales above a monthly average of over ₹1,000 crore in the first four months of 2022. If the movie-going enthusiasm we have seen so far is kept up, this year will see record revenues. Our run of blockbusters was led by a multilingual wave of South Indian movies, Hindi versions of which helped swell hall audiences across the country. Going by the report’s data, Hindi films have such re-dubs to thank for more than half their inflows over this period. Its list of top grossers is headed by Prashanth Neel’s Kannada period drama KGF: Chapter 2, released in five languages, followed by S.S. Rajamouli’s Raj-era Telugu potboiler RRR, dubbed in four. In contrast, Bollywood has had only two top-five hits by revenue, Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s biopic Gangubai Kathiawadi and Vivek Agnihotri’s purported real story, The Kashmir Files, both of which together took in just about a quarter of the top two’s total. Since all of these are set in earlier times, it is tempting to see the distant past as the theme of a demand shift after Indian halls reopened. What leaps off the screen, instead, is the dramatic success of southern cinema.
Like analysts over-sold on films flicked open and watched on hand-held screens, anyone who saw over-the-top action and gold-decked goons as the be-all and end-all of southern cinema should be served humble pie with popcorn. It’s not all about heroics either, as Salman Khan’s analysis has it. Consider the innovation of technique in Radhakrishnan Parthiban’s Iravin Nizhal, a 100-minute Tamil thriller filmed in a single shot that became the talk of Cannes at the latest festival in art-house land. Southern movies are diverse, as one would expect of filmmakers who release many more films than Mumbai’s Hindi industry does. It’s evident that an overdose of testosterone mixed with adrenaline still holds the key to mass-market appeal, and while Bollywood veered into romance and subtle drama for multiplex goers, southern cinema has made the most of digital tools to amplify that mix. Rajamouli’s movies, for example, are mounted mostly as grand spectacles, with animation enabling hyperbolic storytelling of the sort we associate with our age-old nautanki narrative style. In a village square, it would take hand-crafted props to depict the hero in a tug-of-war with a tiger; in today’s times, software does it.
We have a large market for tales aided by digitally exaggerated theatrics and metaversic locales. Also, southern cinema has shown closer readings of the popular pulse, at least in the genre of ‘escape’ movies that tend to reel in the big bucks. But does this hold cues for Bollywood? Many of its recent money-makers have been similar in their aesthetic, with subtlety sacrificed for in-your-face depictions. Yet, let’s face it: Hindi fare would lose its vitality if a box-office chase leads it away from an eclectic sensibility it has long upheld, especially in romantic soundtracks. It has plenty to learn from market trends, no doubt. In adapting to them, it must pull off a trick it was once adept at: being all things to all people. Full-spectrum cinema has been its creative edge since talkies got us talking. As linguistic barriers drop, it must open its ears wider to get its eyes back in.
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