Missing the pulse

Recently, one saw two overhyped films – Anurag Basu’s Kites and Mani Ratnam’s Raavan not doing well at the box-office. And before that movies like What's Your Raashee?, Drona, Yuvvraaj, Veer, London Dreams, Blue and others created hype but eventually fizzled out. Metrolife asked a few movie-buffs in the City on why they feel these movies failed to attract the audience.

When a film carries big names of the industry, expectations are bound to rise. This will pull people to the theatres the first day but when it does not have a good story to support the hype, the film will have a poor response. Vidya, a student who enjoys a regular dose of Bollywood films, says it’s all about knowing the audience’s pulse. “A film should be able to cater to all kinds of audience. For instance, I liked Kites as it had a good modern twist but on the contrary, majority of the people couldn’t relate to it and hence it couldn’t catch the pulse of the audience,” she adds.

It’s not always the storyline that fails, as there have been movies which had a simple story but were presented beautifully. “A normal love triangle in Kuch Kuch Hota Hain was packaged so well. It had nothing spectacular but the way it was picturised was really nice. Of late, films are not showing both. The story nor what comes on screen has any connection, so how does one believe that the film will be a hit?”questions Tej, a working professional.

There was a time when one had no access to other language films, so one would never know when a scene was copied from elsewhere. But now there is a tremendous connection and one can easily spot where they have been ‘inspired’ from. For example, Houseful had many scenes which were lifted from American films.

No amount of promotions or publicity stunts can save a bad high-profile movie and a classic example of that is Tashan. The film was multi-starrer with likes of Anil Kapoor, Saif Ali Khan, Kareena Kapoor and Akshay Kumar. This action-movie was expected to do huge business considering it was product of Yash Raj films.

Kareena donned a bikini for the film but her bikini act also could not save the film. But that’s not always the case, says Anurag, a working professional.

 “Promotions and publicity stunts of films like 3 Idiots or My Name Is Khan were the talk of the town and luckily for all of us, they even lived up to one’s expectations,” he adds.
“At times, negative publicity can prove hard on the film. When a Twitter spat took place between Karan Johar and Ram Gopal Varma, a lot of Karan Johar fans stayed away from Raavan. Fans of such bigwigs can get easily influenced and take things rather personally and spread rumours that the film is bad preventing others from watching it,” says Arshia, a student while adding, “Whatever maybe the reason there’s no denying that all the hype around a film surely brings in the crowd but if it does not substantiate it, there will be only one result to it.”