Question: What is the most effective way to to end up with Rs 100 crore in our line of work? Answer: Start with Rs 1,000 crore! It’s an old joke but still manages to evoke a chuckle because like most great humour, at its heart lies a tragic truth.
With a business as fickle as ours is, it is not surprising that most of us try to clutch on to any straw we can, and seek hope and protection from any source possible. And since filmmaking in any case stems more from a leap of faith rather than a sound financial projection on an Excel sheet, it is to matters in the realm of the divine and supernatural that we most often turn to for support.
Ergo the treks to Ajmer Sharif, Shirdi, Tirupathi, Vaishno Devi, Siddhivinayak Temple or wherever else your faith might take you. And besides seeking divine intervention, we also seek to fix the odds in our favour by resorting to astrology, numerology, feng shui, vastu shastra and other divinatory ‘sciences’. Hence the often strangely spelt film titles with extra or missing letters of the alphabet and the donning of rings set with certain stones specific to your situation and rudraksha malas of varying number of faces or mukhis.
Then there are the superstitions that are widely held. Of how a film title with a negative connotation should be avoided lest those undesirable attributes rub off on the fate of your film too. Or release dates that are supposed to be good or bad – from a celestial point of view.
To that body of work, here is our contribution!
Here’s the hypothesis: a studio that releases a critically and commercially successful film in the month of February usually breaks a jinx and gets into something of a roll that sees it delivering even bigger hits in the months to come.
The most striking example of this proposition was seen last year when Eros International was coming off a pretty lean box office run going back over a year. A phase that saw them face varying degrees of disappointment with Shamitabh, Tevar, Action Jackson, Happy Ending, Lekar Hum Deewana Dil, Kochadaiiyaan, Purani Jeans, Dekh Tamasha Dekh, Dishkiyaoon and Jai Ho. The tide turned with the release of Badlapur: Don’t Miss The Beginning on February 20, which may not have been an all-time blockbuster but it did decent business and garnered critical acclaim, which was exactly the fate of NH10 that followed. Up next was Tanu Weds Manu Returns that netted over Rs 150 crore, to become the first film of the year to enter the Rs 100-crore club. And if that wasn’t good enough, along came Bajrangi Bhaijaan that steamrolled past the Rs 300-crore mark to become the 2nd highest grossing Hindi film of all time. This was followed by Welcome Back and Hero that did decent and average business, respectively, before Bajirao Mastani ended the year in spectacular fashion.
Of course, one swallow does not a summer make so let’s cut back a year further, to February 21, 2014, and the release of Highway. While the film’s presenting studio, Disney/UTV, couldn’t be said to be in the midst of a rut, their previous big release prior to this one, Satyagrah, hadn’t exactly set the cash registers ringing despite a stellar star cast. Again, Highway wasn’t a money spinner but it combined good reviews with fair business. And similar to what we saw in the case of the Eros International case study in the preceding paragraph, it set in motion a chain of successes that kept getting bigger and bigger – including, 2 States, Heropanti, Kick and Haider before climaxing with the biggest film of all time, PK.
Need more proof? Let’s rewind one more year when following an underwhelming Inkaar, Viacom18 released Special 26 on February 8, 2013. In line with the pattern we see emerging, while not the biggest hit of the year, Special 26 achieved the rare task of pleasing the box office and critics alike and set in motion something of a purple patch for the studio that saw it deliver Saheb Biwi Aur Gangster Returns, Chashme Baddoor, the unlikely Rs 100-crore grosser Bhaag Milkha Bhaag and Madras Café in the months thereafter.
End of Flashback. As we fade-in to the present and turn to the collections pages of Box Office India, what do we see? We see Neerja, which released on February 19th, kicking way above its perceived weight with collections of over Rs 60 crore (and growing) and simultaneously garnering huge goodwill and acclaim. The film has been a most welcome success for Fox Star Studios that had an extended run of disappointments at the box office prior to this film’s release.
So if you are the kind who looks for patterns among seeming coincidences – and most in our trade do – it would seem that for Fox Star, Neerja could be the lucky charm that reverses, well, the fault in their stars! Therefore, on the basis of the ‘evidence’ that we have examined in this note, great things hopefully lie in store for the other films lined up for the year by the studio – the upcoming Kapoor & Sons and M.S. Dhoni – The Untold Story, Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, Traffic and Akira thereafter.
We will see how that goes…and we will also see which will be first the studio now to announce a February 2017 release date!
