‘Jawan’ and ‘RARKPK’ could fill Bollywood coffers briefly at best

Two big Hindi films are scheduled to be released over the next few weeks—director Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (RARKPK), followed by Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan. With business down since the pandemic, the Hindi film trade has great hope from these movies.

Quite a few reasons have been offered for this slowdown. First, stars charge huge amounts without drawing in the crowds, making business unviable. Second, the price of tickets has gone through the roof. Third, over-the-top (OTT) streaming services offer similar content at comparatively lower prices. Fourth, big Hollywood action and superhero films with superior production values now open in India on the same day as in the US. Fifth, popcorn and soft drinks sold in multiplexes are prohibitively expensive.

All these reasons are valid. But there is also a structural long-term reason that is neither easy to explain nor fits beautifully into a simplistic story explainable over WhatsApp. Allow me to elaborate.

I grew up in Ranchi in what was then Bihar, where the most expensive film ticket was ₹11. In 1997, I saw Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World at Anupam Cinema in Delhi. The ticket was priced at an unheard of ₹75. Of course, Anupam was India’s first multiplex.

What was peculiar to Anupam then gradually became the norm. Multiplexes sprung up all over the country. The cost of viewing was much higher than what single-screen halls used to charge. Nonetheless, unlike many single-screen halls, their air-conditioners and sound systems worked properly through the movie. This competition made single-screen theatres upgrade, making theatre-going considerably more expensive and pushing this simple pleasure beyond the reach of large numbers in India. Of course, the rise of cable TV helped. What the mass-market audience missed out in cinema halls, they were able to watch on TV screens.

With tickets becoming expensive, the audience that was able to go to cinema halls mostly comprised better-off urban sections of society. This led the Hindi film industry to offer content in line with these sensibilities, implying that the out-and-out maar dhaad masala movie or a love story where the hero and heroine fight everyone to get married in the end—and other such basic plots—went out of the equation.

This gap was first filled by Bhojpuri cinema, which catered to large audiences in the Hindi heartland. But Bhojpuri cinema had poor production values. Further, the dialect is largely spoken in eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, and thus it couldn’t appeal to the broader Hindi heartland.

This is where South Indian movies came in. Many movies originally made in Tamil and Telugu were dubbed in Hindi and released on TV channels, where they found a huge audience. These movies were like Hindi movies of yore, where the hero does all the fighting, also romances the heroine and has values that would make parents cry. As Stephen Fry writes in The Fry Chronicles: “As in food so in the wider culture. Anything astringent, savoury, sharp, complex, ambiguous, or difficult is ignored in favour of the colourful, the sweet, the hollow and the simple.”

Meanwhile, many Hindi films were made for what was termed ‘the urban multiplex audience’. This drove business and led to the rise of intellectual filmmakers, who frankly made some great cinema that was perhaps intellectually very satisfying and enjoyable for them, their friends and a small part of the overall urban audience. In the process, Hindi cinema lost touch with India’s mass market. Of course, this is not a clear linear argument, as it did make some masala movies as well.

The covid pandemic led to big-time OTT adoption, with rich multiplex audiences figuring out that their kind of content could easily be watched on OTT platforms in home comfort.

So, now audiences visit theatres largely to watch movies mounted on a grand scale. That is why the release of Jawan and RARKPK will lift sentiment in the Hindi film industry, but only briefly, because enough content isn’t being made that can draw people into theatres at the prices being charged.

In the last few years, there has been a trend of setting Hindi film stories in smaller North Indian towns. Nonetheless, the storylines of these movies—from living-in to homosexuality—perhaps appeal more to an urban multiplex audience. When was the last time you watched an out-and-out action masala movie or even something like a Mirzapur, set in a small North Indian town? The trouble is even if some producer would attempt such a project now, unless the film is fronted by a male superstar, the chances of it drawing the metropolitan urban audiences to multiplexes remain low. As far as smaller towns are concerned, multiplexes priced them out many years back.

Now this is my grand narrative on what I think is the basic problem with the business of Hindi cinema. Nonetheless, as J. Bradford Long points out in Slouching Towards Utopia, quoting the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, grand narratives are nonsense. Hence, “in a sense, all human thought is nonsense: fuzzy, prone to confusions, and capable of leading us astray.” But then, that’s the only way we can think.

Vivek Kaul is the author of ‘Bad Money’.