Certification delays remain a chronic headache for producers, cinema owners

While the committee is meant to provide a secondary review of disagreements, in practice, its operations are opaque and constrained by the same issues that plague the board to begin with, leaving filmmakers and theatre owners ultimately to bear the cost of certification delays.

While Sivakarthikeyan-starrer Parasakthi released on 10 January after facing scrutiny from the CBFC over alleged factual inaccuracies and the producers appealing to the revising committee, Vijay’s Jana Nayagan remains stuck between court orders and the CBFC mandates.

“A lot of these issues arise because makers wait until the last minute when the release is only a few days away, and the CBFC and the revising committee are already dealing with a huge backlog," said film producer and distributor Yusuf Shaikh, also founder and chief executive of low-cost theatre chain Janta Cinema.

Shaikh added that these bodies are genuinely understaffed, and delays often mean producers have to resort to additional fees to expedite the process, which many, especially independent filmmakers, cannot afford.

Perennial issue

Censorship delays often disrupt theatrical schedules and cause significant inconvenience to cinema owners, as advance bookings for tentpole films typically begin nearly a week before release. Promotional losses for such films can run into ₹25-30 crore.

In multi-cinema releases, including overseas markets, exhibitors also face the brunt as they are forced to refund tickets.

In an interview to Mint, on 6 August, Monisha Advani, producer at Emmay Entertainment, co-producer of John Abraham-starrer Vedaa, said there was an inordinate delay in the film receiving final certification and the movie’s team needed to address the concerns of partners, including distributors and exhibitors, as to why promotional material such as the trailer had not been released weeks before the theatrical release date.

After the last-minute postponement of Jana Nayagan, over 450,000 tickets worth ₹1 crore had to be refunded, according to industry estimates. “Jana Nayagan’s absence from the Pongal weekend, a hugely lucrative holiday period, dented the Tamil box office in a big way. The cumulative box office of smaller alternative films has not reached ₹100 crore," independent trade analyst Sreedhar Pillai said.

Experts point out that in practice, approaching the revising committee is not uncommon when a film has been refused certification or subjected to onerous cuts by the examining committee, and it remains one of the few intra-CBFC avenues for creative teams to seek reconsideration before turning to litigation. However, the process is fraught with complexities.

Ketan Mukhija, partner, co-head, private equity and venture capital practice at Kochar & Co, said the challenges of taking a film to the revising committee are significant: It can cause delays in certification with consequent financial and scheduling pressure on release plans, it carries uncertainties around the extent and nature of required cuts, and it exposes makers to procedural stress and indirect pressures to compromise to avoid missing key windows for marketing and exhibition.

Independent filmmakers with limited resources are particularly affected by these burdens, he added.

“The primary challenge of taking a film to the revising committee is the high stakes of time and uncertainty, which can be fatal for big-budget releases tied to specific festival windows like Pongal or Diwali. The committee process consumes additional weeks, often forcing filmmakers to choose between a delayed release and accepting creative surgery. Furthermore, there is always a risk of the committee suggesting more stringent cuts than the examining committee," said Anupam Shukla, partner, Pioneer Legal.

With the 2021 abolition of the Film Certification Appellate Tribunal (FCAT), the revising committee is now the final internal hurdle before a filmmaker is forced into expensive and lengthy writ litigation in high courts, creating immense pressure on producers, Shukla added.

Narayan Parasuram, director and professor at Somaiya Vidyavihar University, Mumbai, who has interacted with the CBFC on many of the content he has produced over the years, said the revising committee is supposed to be approached only in rare and exceptional situations. However, today most producers are flooding the body, making it difficult for producers with genuine concerns to access.