Wednesday, February 16, 2005

All Flops! Bollywood in the doldrums

Rediff is ranking all of this week's top-ten Hindi films as flops.

It's not that shocking: most films released in India lose money, and studios and producers apparently depend upon the occasional "super-hit" to stay in business. Still, this is the first time I've seen a complete sweep of flops; it must be a real dry spell.

Then again, how reliable is Rediff on this? Hindi film sites generally give very little concrete data on box office returns -- as in Rupee amounts. I gather there isn't a reliable national system for precisely measuring them, so perhaps all this talk of "flop," "average," "hit," and "super-hit" is a bit subjective. Or perhaps I just haven't found a consistently updated website or news source that does this? Neither Rediff nor Yahoo India currently give exact numbers in their weekly summaries.

I still want to see Kisna, which promises to be visually intense. And I'm curious about how they handle the interracial angle (is this the first major bollywood film that puts such a relationship at the center of the film?).

But I'm not at all curious about Black, which just looks melodramatic and overblown.

4 Comments:

Quizman said...

They do. Check out Taran Adarsh's pages. Adarsh writes (and iirc, edits) Trade Guide, the box office reference guide to Indian cinema.

3:37 PM  
Amardeep said...

Taran Adarsh is helpful. But the IndiaFM website has some pretty brutal Spyware. I made the mistake of clicking through in IE, and spent the last hour cleaning my PC.

To readers using Internet Explorer without Spyware/Adware protection I would strongly suggest you DO NOT CLICK on Quizman's link.

Someone should compile a blacklist of commercial Desi sites that have spyware on them... There are far too many of them!

7:15 PM  
Quizman said...

oh, dear. Sorry about that. I use Mozilla and I had no problem.

11:07 PM  
Argileto said...

'Page 3', which I happen to know was not made on much of a budget, is listed as a hit, not a flop.
I saw Kisna a few weeks ago, and although Isha Shervani was worth the $10 I paid (she does this thing with a rope), absolutely nothing else was. The interracial romance was awkward and forced, the English-accented Hindi grated awfully on the ears (Do idiot film makers actually think that ICS officers who had lived in the country for half a century talked like that? Having met several of those left alive about a decade ago, I know that the vast majority did not) and although the Himalayas looked granite and brooding, there's little call for them in a movie with Vivek Oberoi, who is quite granite and brooding enough, thanks.
Meanwhile, Black was shot on a set that tried to look like Switzerland and managed to look like a set.

8:39 PM  

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