5 reasons why Bollywood studios are in complete loss despite casting a Hrithik Roshan or a Ranbir Kapoor!

With UTV on the brink of bankruptcy, more will follow…

Hrithik Roshan’s Mohenjo Daro was one of the biggest flops of the industry this year. The Ashutosh Gowariker directorial had a huge budget thanks to involving a huge star in Hrithik Roshan and the money involved in the productions costs, and failed to recover enough to make a profit.

This also lead UTV, one of the studios, involved in the film’s financing, in the brink of bankruptcy. Disney has threatened to shut shop, which is likely to happen anytime soon. UTV Motion Pictures, a subsidiary of Disney, will close down soon if the buzz is to be believed.

So what happened here? How come a movie production house with so much money and international banking go bankrupt with the failure of just one film?

Well, the matter is not just about one film or one studios. As per an article in popular website, Quint, the issue is far deeper and darker. Not just UTV Motion Pictures, many other corporate studios like Studio18, PVR Pictures, Phantom Films, Reliance Entertainment already on the process of closing down. However, the writer of the article A Krishna, revealed that family owned businesses like YRF, Dharma Productions and Vishesh Films are working well.

Here are five reasons why he believes why corporate studios are running into losses.

# Studio Heads are not creatively inclined

Most of the studio heads in these corporate fields are not any film directors or producers, or have any sort of film inclination. They are just a high profile business management graduates, who are more interested in the studios minting money than them investing in good cinema. In short, theses are people who believe stars bring money, and not a story.

# Treating films like commodities

Another interesting point that A Krishna pointed out is that most of the movies are seen by the studios as a star vehicle than a proper cinema. So you will have a Salman Khan film or an Akshay Kumar flick, but they are not exactly seen cinema in whole. For these studios, they are just another product of a Fast Moving Consumer Good. They are not interested in the plot of other technical values of the film, just which star they have roped in. So you know whom to blame if you get a movie like Bombay Velvet, Jai Ho, Gabbar is Back or Kites.

# Don’t have the talent to spot talent

Many studios give new talent opportunities to begin with, both as actors or on technical terms like directors. However, how many of them actually are successful in their endeavours or are talented enough to make good films or be good actors? It’s mostly the family owned productions houses, headed by creative people like Karan Johar and Aditya Chopra, that do a good job at this as they know who can work in the long run. So you have directors like Shakun Batra, Kabir Khan, Ali Abbas Zafar etc. being groomed into being the high profile directors they are now. As for most of the talent chosen by corporate studios, they mostly turn out to be yes-men who answers to their master’s call and make films by the numbers.

# Paying a high cost to non-deserving films

Remember that film, Bangistaan? This film starring Riteish Deshmukh and Pulkit Samrat, and directed by debutant Karan Anshuman, was bought by Junglee Pictures, who reportedly paid Excel Entertainment Rs 35 crore along with Dil Dhadakne Do in a 2-film deal. Bangistaan just made Rs 5 crore at the box office, running huge losses for the buyer. That’s one example of how studios look to buying glossy looking film at a high price, but earn very low returns on it. This also happen in successful films like Baaghi, which was bought by Disney UTV from Sajid Nadiadwala, but only UTV earned only 10% of the revenue.

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# Sudden change in tactics also ruin things

When a film does bad business, the first thing that most of these corporate studios do, is blame the CEO and get him sacked. This negative approach actually lowers the morale of the people working there and also make the outsiders lose trust in the company. And even after removing the said person, they hire someone with similar qualification bit less or nil inclination towards creativity as his replacement.

You can read the entire article here…

5 reasons why Bollywood studios are in complete loss despite casting a Hrithik Roshan or a Ranbir Kapoor!