By Shailesh Kapoor
Salman Khan starrer Prem Ratan Dhan Payo was only a moderate success in its theatrical release last Diwali. The film broke the record for the highest opening day box-office, on the strength of its lead star, aggressive promotions, a chartbuster title song and a wide festive release. But thereafter, it struggled to consolidate, getting patronage largely from smaller towns and single screen theatres.
The film eventually ended its lifetime India business at well less than Rs 200 crore, only about 60% of Bajrangi Bhaijaan’s business, another 2015 Salman Khan release. It scored an average 56% on Ormax’s WOM (word-of-mouth) rating, a measure of audience appreciation, well short of Bahubali (83%) and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (77%), and not in the Top 15 of the year.
None of this came in the way, however, for the performance of the film on television. In BARC India’s ratings released yesterday, Prem Ratan Dhan Payo(Star Gold) outperformed Bajrangi Bhaijaan and Bahubali to emerge as the most-watched television premiere from 2015. It also set the number to beat in the short history of BARC India.
The film was promoted as a Valentine’s Day attraction on television, though it is safe to say that the few urban Indians who celebrated Valentine’s Day (Sunday makes it tougher) didn’t do so by watching PRDP together on the telly. But then, we know by now that those “few†are too few to count, in the context of audience measurement.
What the big-city theatre audiences look down upon as kitsch, is gold for television viewers. Ironically though, when Bollywood uses mass television to promote its new releases, it never quite gets this dichotomy. The notion that everyone who watches TV goes to theatres every other weekend is of course a highly flawed one. The actual proportion is less than 10%.
The huge success of films and also Naagin on weekends raises another pertinent question: Why are weekday shows not rating at weekend levels, despite more audience availability on weekdays primetime? If the top weekend properties can attract more than 6% audiences to one destination, why are the top weekday shows even struggling to touch the 3% mark.
On the face of it, high fragmentation on weekdays is the explanation. But in real terms, it’s more a symptom than a cause. Weekdays are seeing increasing fragmentation because they lack those marquee content pieces that have the ability to aggregate audiences. It perhaps becomes easier to maintain the quality of storytelling in a biweekly show than in a daily. Shouldn’t we be seeing more biweeklies and weeklies then?
Whichever way one looks at the data, the success of movie premieres like PRDP suggests that audiences will aggregate to one destination, no matter how high the clutter is, if the content has the requisite pull. Outside Naagin, our television lacks such aggregators today. Will 2016 give us another one? Your guess is as good as mine.