As the whole world is adapting to the ‘new-normal’, film industry has also started its journey towards the OTTs and ATTs. Until the pandemic, makers used to flaunt about the number of theatres in which their movies are playing. Stars used to derive pride from their movies’ box office records. But now, it seems to be an end for all that trumpet blowing, and industry has nothing to do but rely on OTTs. In the golden era of Tollywood, NTR and ANR’s films used to release in 25-30 theatres which is considered to be a big number then. This number got exponentially increased to as high as thousand theatres now.
But now the rise of OTT platforms is going to change this number game forever. Presently the ‘collections’ jargon is divided into ‘Baahubali’ and ‘Non-Baahubali’ records. As it is almost impossible for most of the movies to cross the humongous collection records set by ‘Baahubali’, all our makers turned towards the ‘non-Baahubali’ ones. But it is not completely scientific to judge the stamina of a movie entirely by its collections. As the ticket prices are constantly increased, we can’t compare a movie whose ticket was one rupee in the 70s to the present flicks which are burning a hole in our pockets.
OTT platforms measure the stamina of a film by the number of views and the duration. This process will change the entire dynamics of the movies and perspective of the so called ‘hit’. For example, ‘Karunamayudu’ by Vijayachander became a super hit and it was seen by Christians all over the nation. It was dubbed into almost every language and we can infer that ‘Karunamayudu’ would be seen by more viewers than ‘Baahubali’.
This OTT trend will definitely change the false and egoistic attitude of our stars and film makers. Gone are the days of spreading fake records and accentuating stardom. If technology would have been in the golden era, ‘PatalaBhairavi’ and ‘Mayabazar’ would also have become Pan-Indian movies. Finally, time has come to concentrate on the quality rather than dwelling on the laurels of false records.
