BackWhy Pakistan’s decision to lift Bollywood ban isn’t surprising
The film exhibition business in Pakistan comprising 100 theatres is mainly dependent on Bollywood and Hollywood fare
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New Delhi: Last weekend, Pakistani newspaper Dawn, among others, reported that the country’s cinema houses that had suspended the screening of Indian films, will resume the same this week. The Pakistan government had banned all television and radio content from India and stopped screening Indian films after an escalation in tensions between the two countries this September.
The move was also seen as a response to the Indian Motion Picture Producers Association (IMPPA) banning all Pakistani actors, singers and technicians from working in India till normalcy was restored.
To be sure, while the Film Exhibitors’ Association in Pakistan has announced its intentions to lift the ban, the government is yet to formally grant a no-objection certificate, said film producer and chairman of the Central Board of Film Certification, Pahlaj Nihalani. There have been efforts to first take Amitabh Bachchan-starrer Pink that has already been censored for viewing in the country, besides Aamir Khan’s Dangal which released in India this week and for which Pakistani television channel Geo TV has bought the country’s theatrical distribution rights for.
Also read: Aamir Khan’s ‘Dangal’ gets rave reviews
The move hardly comes as a surprise though, said industry experts. Firstly, the film exhibition business in Pakistan comprising 100 theatres is mainly dependent on Bollywood and Hollywood fare. The country saw about 40-50 Bollywood releases a year and another 50 Hollywood offerings until the ban.
A medium-budget Bollywood film is able to collect Rs5-6 crore in Pakistan. Big-ticket movies, featuring popular faces like Salman, Aamir or Shah Rukh Khan have a track record of managing even more. For instance, Aamir Khan’s PK collected over Rs22 crore at the Pakistani box-office, beating the country’s own blockbuster Waar (2013). Yash Raj Films’ action franchise instalment Dhoom 3 (2013) did even better than PK, with Rs24 crore and more recently, despite apprehensions about how it would be received in Pakistan, while Salman Khan’s Bajrangi Bhaijaan brought in about Rs15-16 crore.
“The local Pakistani productions are hardly up to the mark," said Atul Mohan, editor of trade magazine Complete Cinema. “And how much of foreign fare can you serve? You need something closer home."
Secondly, the audience in Pakistan has greater demands.
“There has been a spurt in multiplexes in Pakistan lately and that audience is hardly interested in the local Punjabi and Urdu cinema," Nihalani said. “Those remain popular only in single screens, if at all."
And finally, while Indian movies only formally returned to Pakistan in 2008 after the country lifted the ban imposed after the 1965 dispute, pirated DVDs had flooded the latter’s markets all along. Trade experts say that Indian film piracy has continued and flourished in the neighbouring country all these years with the DVDs re-routed mainly through the Middle East.
There is no final word on whether such moves can help de-escalate age-old tensions between the two countries, but the general consensus is that cultural exchange is best left outside the purview of political conflict.
Political concerns are indeed genuine, but they should not come at the cost of cultural exchanges that bring benefits to both sides of the border, an editorial in the Dawn had said earlier this year, adding that “in terms of being crowd-pullers on a large scale, nothing beats the content being generated by the mammoth industry next door".
As Mohan said, “Cultural exchange has always had the ability to unite India and Pakistan. The two countries already trade in so many things. Then why target sports and cinema? Why can’t cinema just be seen as a business? If you see, Pakistan is as a big a box office territory as say, Delhi, for the industry."
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