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Tag: Animal

  • Shailesh Kapoor presents his five most significant landmarks of the year that has just passed us

    From SRK to Animal: Success Stories of 2023

     

     

    By Shailesh Kapoor

     

    Shailesh KapoorThe year 2023 had its fair share of success stories, across cinema and OTT at least. Here’s my pick of the five most significant landmarks of the year (in chronological order), which could, in turn, shape how Indian entertainment pans out in the next half decade at least.

     

    The return of SRK, and the old guard in general

    January saw Shah Rukh Khan mark a box-office comeback with Pathaan. It had been a decade since he had a bona fide hit (Chennai Express). But with Pathaan, he announced his return, in an innings that’s already seeming a lot of fun. Pathaan was followed in September by Jawan, which went on to become an even bigger success. SRK’s December release Dunki has received mixed response, and significantly lower collections. But with SRK, and with Sunny Deol in Gadar 2, it seems like we are back in the ’90s. Superstars from that era are showing the young guys how it’s done!

     

    Farzi: The Real Thing

    In what was not the best year for OTT (curtailed subscriber growth, very few breakout properties), one show stood out as an outright blockbuster: Raj-DK’s Farzi, on Prime Video, starring Shahid Kapoor and Vijay Sethupathi, became the most-watched Indian SVOD show of all time, with an estimated 37 Million (Ormax Media estimates) Indians having watched at least one episode. Coming after the immensely successful and appreciated The Family Man, Farzi established Raj-DK as one of the most powerful names in the Indian streaming space. Their next venture Guns & Gulaabs (Netflix) fell short of achieving the same heights. But Farzi’s success confirmed that mass entertainers, rather than urban-centric understated content, is likely to be the way ahead for web-series in India.

     

    JioCinema: A ‘free’ ride

    The arrival of JioCinema, with an IPL edition that was free to stream, brought in a sea change in the Indian OTT landscape in March 2023. The platform made some of the global giants relook at their India strategy. Disney+ Hotstar offered the Cricket World Cup free later in the year. JioCinema backed the IPL season with a plethora of launches, most notably Asur 2 and Taali. But over the last four-five months, they have gone easy on things, and relied more on non-fiction properties, especially Bigg Boss. Perhaps IPL 2024 is when we will see more activity around the platform.

     

    Barbenheimer

    Who would have thought that a Hollywood film clash will make headlines in India? The Barbie vs. Oppenheimer weekend in August 2023 brought in about Rs. 100 Cr (gross) worth of box office in India, which was also one of the few countries where Oppenheimer was ahead of Barbie at the box office. Hollywood has not had its best year in India, with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Hollywood’s mainstay in the Indian market, being on some sort of a downtrend. But with Oppenheimer, we saw audiences flocking theatres in the service of a director urban India has come to love: Christopher Nolan.

     

    Animal instincts

    December 2023 saw the release of director Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal, a film that polarised critics, but was largely embraced by the audiences, going on to become one of the most significant success stories of the year, especially because it’s headlined by a younger star (not from the ‘old guard’). After Atlee’s Jawan, Vanga’s Animal established the firm hold directors from South India are beginning to have on Hindi audience’s imagination, through their distinctive style of storytelling. Everything about Animal, right from its trailer to the choreography and background music of its action set-pieces, broke conventional rules of mass Indian cinema. And it was very heartening that another film (12th Fail) that came just a month before Animal, and broke a few rules of cinema too, also got immense audience love, especially for its scale, cast and budget. That Animal and 12th Fail can co-exist augurs well for Hindi cinema, which had its best-ever year by some margin.

     

  • In the short-term future, we can expect franchises to dominate Hindi cinema and OTT, writes Shailesh Kapoor

    All eyes on the franchise

     

     

    By Shailesh Kapoor

     

    Shailesh KapoorIn context of a report Ormax Media is publishing next week, a staggering data point was brought to my attention. Forty-five per cent of Hindi theatrical business in 2023 till the weekend of December 3 has come from franchise films, i.e., films that were already a part of a franchise or a franchise universe at the time of their release.

     

    With Animal and Dunki being non-franchise films, and Salaar: Part 1 being the first of its franchise, this proportion will drop to 35-40% by the end of the year. But the staggering-ness is not in the 45% itself. It’s in the year-on-year comparison.

     

    Proportion of Hindi box-office from franchise films was only 19% in 2019, and increased to 31% in 2022 (the interim years were pandemic-disrupted). Within two full years, the contribution of franchise films to the Hindi box-office has doubled.

     

    The equivalent number in Hollywood has been in the high 70s or 80s for a while now, depending on the year we look at. Clearly, Hindi cinema is moving in that direction. It could be a matter of another couple of years that we hit 60%, if not even higher.

     

    Even on OTT, franchises are beginning to dominate, now that the category is somewhat settled in India. Amazon Prime Video has done a particularly good job of building strong franchises, none less than The Family Man and Panchayat. The latter is produced by TVF, which is a franchise factory of sorts, with a long list of illustrious web original franchises, such as Kota Factory, Gullak, Aspirants, Permanent Roommates, Pitchers, Hostel Daze, etc.

     

    Linear television’s attempts with franchise creation have been less emphatic, but that’s only because the approach to having seasons does not exist, and it’s impossible to do a Season 2 if Season 1 is the ever-running season anyway. Yet, Zee TV has managed to create some sort of a quasi-franchise, which some young audiences even have a name for: The Bhagya Universe. It has three largely-unconnected shows in it: Kumkum Bhagya (2014), Kundali Bhagya (2017) and Bhagya Lakshmi (2021), all three produced by Balaji Telefilms.

     

    The rise of franchise content is an interesting phenomenon. At one end, audiences crave for new stories and characters, because fresh and imaginative ideas is generally a strong driver of content consumption. But at the other end is the comfort in watching something familiar. This continuum of original to familiar is a compelling one, because both ends of it are strong on intrinsic benefits related to why content is watched to begin with.

     

    There are franchise films and shows that manage to re-imagine their world, and provide freshness within the familiar. Some of the early Marvel films, leading up to Avengers: Endgame, managed to do this very well. But those are far and few in between, and in general, franchise content willingly lets go of new imagination, and focuses on the familiarity factor.

     

    So, if franchise content is becoming stronger than before, does it mean that audiences prefer comfort of the familiar to the excitement of something original and imaginative? That’s not an evident piece of truth. The real difference lies in the differing risk levels. Franchise properties are significantly safer than non-franchise ones. The latter must get the idea, however original it maybe, right. In the former, that’s already been tested.

     

    But we need a healthy mix, because if franchises begin to dominate to the extent of 70-80%, which is a real possibility soon, the originality will get sucked out of the content ecosystem, leading to a decline in business at some stage in the cycle.

     

    Be that as it may, in the short-term future, we can expect franchises to dominate Hindi cinema and OTT categories, in a way India may have never seen before.

     

  • If the three big films live up to their expectations, 2023 has more than a real chance of becoming the best ever year at the box-office, with a gross business of Rs 12kcr, writes Shailesh Kapoor

    One-worded Box-office Beasts

     

     

    By Shailesh Kapoor

     

    Shailesh KapoorIt’s a huge Friday at the box office today. Ranbir Kapoor starrer Animal, directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, releases today, and is set to witness one of the highest openings in Hindi cinema, with even a shot at the 50 Cr first-day box-office, a mark that only four Hindi films have ever achieved.

     

    2023 has been an interesting year at the Indian box-office. A series of non-performing films have been punctuated by mammoth blockbusters. In the Hindi language, it started with Pathaan in Jaunary, post which we saw a long period of flops, with an occasional hit like Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani. August saw positive momentum shift, with Gadar 2 emerging as a huge blockbuster. And then, Jawan followed it up early September, recording the highest-ever lifetime box-office for a Hindi film at the domestic box-office.

     

    In the Tamil market too, Jailer (Rajinikanth) and Leo (Vijay) have done great numbers, and are a part of the list of top 5 grossers of the year, after Jawan, Pathaan and Gadar 2. Animal would be challenging to enter this list, as will Dunki, the third Shah Rukh Khan release this year.

     

    What’s with film with one-word names, most of which are names or descriptors of their lead characters, doing well? Perhaps there’s more than a coincidence at play here. It could be a sign that audiences are gravitating towards superstardom and larger-than-life hero characters again. While this factor always existed, the pre-pandemic period in Hindi cinema saw a slew of thematic and genre-led films do very well. With OTT around, theatre-going is about scale today, more than ever before. But it need not be the conventional definition of “scale”, which comes with elements like large sets (Bhansali) or VFX (Marvel). It’s about bold-stroke, larger-than-life storytelling too, led by protagonists with an unmistakable swagger.

     

    If the three big films of December (Animal, Salaar and Dunki) live up to their expectations, 2023 has more than a real chance of becoming the best-ever year at the India box-office, with a gross business of 12,000 Cr in India.

     

    Animal, however, won’t be the only media highlight of this weekend. We have important elections results coming up this Sunday, when votes for legislative elections in five states will be counted. These results can have a significant influence on how the national politics will look like in 2024, in the lead up to the General Elections.

     

    Irrespective of how the film fares or what the election results are, one thing is certain: There won’t be a dull moment for media & entertainment observers this weekend.