Off lately we have witnessed an increasing trend in the industry.
Globalization has proven to be a boon as it introduced so many new things to us. This advent of globalization has brought many new aspects with it.
One of the advent is culture.
What defines culture better than our movies?
Movies are an essential part of our culture. We are a country that is obsessed with movies having being a part of World Cinema for over a century now. But is it that our movies are losing a grip on the audiences or is it just the arrival of better cinema has drifted our audiences and have compelled them to choose a different side altogether?
Recently one of the biggest exports from Hollywood, Furious 7 released which marked the last installment of the late actor Paul Walker who was known for playing the role of Brian in the franchise. The character was a close associate of the franchise’s lead character Dominic Toretto and also the late actor was more like family to the lead actor Vin Diesel in real life.
The movie happened to release just a day before the much-anticipated adaptation of the character of Detective Byomkesh Bakshi, a Bengali detective who is quite popular with his own short stories and television series to his name. The adaptation, produced by one of the top production companies of the country Yashraj Films, was titled Detective Byomkesh Bakshy!
The results however were quite shocking.
According to standard norms, when a foreign movie is compared to or released with a movie that “Bollywood” produces, the latter always manages to rake in all the moolah no matter what. But this one instance changed everyone’s perception for good.
Furious 7 on the very first day itself took an opening of Rs.11-13 Crores with an occupancy of 85% as compared to a mere 35% occupancy of Detective Byomkesh Bakshy. The movie also went on to become one of the first Hollywood movies to cross the coveted 100 Crore club that our industry values so much. Apart from this the movie also managed to eat every other movie’s business that released one or two weeks around it. All people wanted to see cars crashing, guns pounding and fists landing on each other when the protagonists fought with the sole intention of killing each other in the movie.
The unfortunate demise of Paul Walker also contributed to the film’s success as loyal fans wanted to see their star resurrected for one last time and by all means the movie proved to be the perfect tribute anyone could ever give.
On the other hand Detective Byomkesh Bakshy had Dibakar Banerjee’s astute directorial skills yielding the megaphone but it still couldn’t really click the way the director was hoping for. Reason for that was perhaps the story that gave out much detail about the main antagonist by the time movie reached interval. Not so strong portrayal of Sushant Singh Rajput was also one of the reasons why the movie couldn’t hold its audience. The actor’s portrayal of the detective was more of a puzzle solver when the actual character was always a truth seeker.
No matter what happened slowly and steadily our audience’s have started to open up to foreign movies especially when it comes to Hollywood.
The Hollywood too has reciprocated by releasing their mega budget movies at least a week in advance here in India after having seen the response their movies get. It is yet to be seen which other movie manages to achieve the same feat that Furious 7 was able to achieve.
