Arts
Tattered Kites
Who killed Kites and Raavana?
| Let’s get one thing straight. Nobody on earth can claim to know what makes a hit or flop at the box office. For all the big talk and baggage of a row of big hits, only god — and maybe the hydra-headed monster called the audience — know the truth.
Who can forget the all-time-great Sholay? The very same team followed it up with the much hyped, over-the-top Shaan? After three days, even the ushers and agents at the ticket counters had that haunted look. Sure the movie business has always been risky, but never so dangerously uncertain as it is today. The respected film distributor and consultant Amod Mehra says that if “B-town lost over Rs. 200 crores ($45 million) over the 70 odd releases in this first quarter, it is all set to lose at least another Rs. 250 crores ($57 million) in the second.” This period incidentally will field over 120 films. God help the B-town bozos!
Some notable recent thuds include What’s Your Rashee, Kurban, Badmash Company, Pathshala, Phoonk 2, City of Gold, A Wonderful Afterlife, Jaane Kahan Se Aiyee Hain … and of course, this year’s biggest flops: Kites & Raavan. Okay, first things first. Why was Kites so crazily hyped by the media? Simple. The sizzling Hrithik-Barbie chemistry — said to have even rocked the marriage and send wifey Suzie in a tizzy — was dynamite for the media. It was also grandly pitched as India’s first-ever, international, cross-over film. The hi-ticket, Hollywood-imported technicians and Brett Ratner, the hot-shot editor commissioned to cut it for the global markets, further upped the ante. The tightly controlled promos and stills generated curiosity and excitement and hence, expectation peaked to a frenzy when the film was released. The marketers of Kites played the media like a harp in the run up to the movie’s release across all channels with their photo-ops, interviews, etc., culminating at the Cannes Film Fest.
If what followed was a disaster, then the press can legitimately fall back on the classic defense. “Hey, don’t shoot me, I am just the piano player!” Kites’ failure is a clear case of product-performance mismatch, which no marketing, advertising and promotion on earth could undo. To a fever-pitch audience fed on the Kites masala to set their temperature soaring, the film turned out to be a damp squib. Neither a global film, nor a local one — the subtitles spelt doom and disaster in the smaller, Bollywood-crazy metros — it fell flat on its face, in the middle of the in-between. Little wonder that a bunch of exhibitors and distributors allegedly stormed Hrithik Roshans’ office, demanding their money back and accusing him of not selling a Hindi, but English-Spanish film. A local wit concluded that “Kites is not Kati Patang, (Cut Kite) but Phati Patang! (Tattered Kite).” Raavan too bacame a victim of mega expectations gone sour. A magnificent Santosh Sivan visual feast, this epic’s disappointment appeared to reside inhistorical, geographical and political limbo. Projected as a new-age Ramayan, where the barriers between good and evil keeps blurring (Ram is not Mr. Virtuous; Raavan is not the dog he’s made out to be; Sita is sexily confused between the two, even hitting the Stockholm Syndrome button and green lighting polygraph in place of Agnipariksha — wow!) the concept from the master filmmaker was seductively audacious and exciting … but only flattered to deceive. Abhishek’s Beera Munda was an over-the-top, over-made-up freako … a role that just went horribly wrong! Ash looks sublime and maybe the best thing in the movie. Vikram? Vikram who?
In both movies, the hype and hoopla, aggressive marketing and promotion backfired and did them in. Anurag Basu is a very successful director with a fabulous track record. Hrithik Roshan is a fine, dedicated actor and a huge star. Mani Ratnam — what does one say of his genius? These films didn’t deserve the fate they suffered, but when you unleash a Frankenstein — with hype and publicity taking on a life of their own — you tread on very dangerous territory. Nothing is worse than a prospective (suitor?) audience-base, led up the garden path and left dangling …. Are these flops related to box-office showing — Kites is the third highest grossing film of 2010 and is still the 8th largest-grossing movie at the turnstiles in India — or did the gigantic production and marketing costs force them into failure? Answers film critic Rauf Ahmed: “Would the media give a damn if it wasn’t a mega-budgeted, glamour, starry project with intrinsic masala built into it? How many stories (in the press or TV) did you hear or see about modest, small budget successful films of recent times, like A Wednesday, Sajjanpur, Mumbai Meri Jaan, Firaq or Japanese Wife? It’s the big, glam, star-studded projects that attract the press … because that’s the way the cookie crumbles in a Bollywood-crazy world! Win some, lose some. Both Roshan and Mani Ratnam are familiar with big budgets and glamour. Its just that this time, it didn’t work.” Okay, so what about the media — an active and enthusiastic partner in the marketing and promotion of these films — responsibility when these hyped films bomb? Is there a sense of disappointment or conscience at work? Not for a second, says respected film critic Saibal Chatterjee: “Why on earth should they fly or drown when films they have been associated with zoom or flop … especially when these are mega-budgeted, starry affairs? They have been co-opted to do a job. It’s completely a professional matter. Conscience, missionary zeal, etc. only come into play when one is championing the small cinema, which has no budget … but truth, passion and intensity, and desperately needs to be promoted. That’s where commitment beyond professional calling comes in.”
Finally, is there any take-out, message or moral in the Kites, Raavan disasters? Frankly none, because what the audience likes and why defies logic and remains a closely guarded secret between the box office and God! Furthermore, with dozens of small budget films (hymned and celebrated only a year ago) crashing at the box-office, confusion has only got more confounded. Who knows, from the ashes of Kites, something new and exciting may rise and shine … and from the debris of Raavan, a new epic, scripted? In a business where one is expected to expect the unexpected … cross your fingers guys! Tomorrow is another day, remember?
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