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Bollywood has been going through a tough time for the past few months. While films like Stree 2 and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 3 worked at the box office, there have been many big ticket films that fell flat after the opening day. The conversation around ‘block bookings’ has also gained steam in the last few months, which basically means that the makers are buying tickets for their own films so they can show bigger numbers to the audience. Kunal Kohli, who has made films like Hum Tum, Fanaa, among others in the 2000s, recently spoke about this practice that has plagued not just Bollywood, but Tamil and Telugu industries as well.
In a recent chat on the YouTube channel Aleena Dissects, Kunal called this a “rubbish” practice and said, “What is this rubbish? Matlab we make the film, we release the film and then we only buy tickets to watch the film?” Kunal then pointed out that the only reason for makers to make block bookings was to please their star’s ego. “The reason you are doing block bookings is ego, to pamper that star, to not show him the reality, to pamper that director, to pamper that producer, to pamper that star,” he said. Kunal presumably meant that this was a way of pleasing everyone associated with the film and not confront about their failure.
He continued, “Dekho bhaiya aapki picture ne itna toh kar dia. First day itna kar dia, fir baaki galti director ki thi ki yeh picture chali nahi. Main toh as an actor itna le aaya. (Look this is how much your film has done. The opening day brought in this much, but the rest is the director’s problem. I did what I could as an actor.) Or for the director to say that I got this, audience didn’t understand my film, or whatever.” Kunal implied that this was a way of passing the buck so someone else gets the blame of the failure. He then brought up films like Pushpa and Stree, that did not indulge in such practices and worked tremendously well at the box office. “When a film works, you don’t need to do anything. Pushpa, Stree, you don’t need to do anything, chal gayi na picture,” he said.
Kunal insisted that the audience is completely aware of the fake numbers and added that this makes a star believe that they have achieved something, that they haven’t. “Nobody believes those numbers so what are you doing? You are doing a very harmful thing because you are making an actor believe, or the actor is convincing himself that I have done this, you haven’t done it, accept it. Till you don’t accept your failure, you can’t be successful again. The biggest directors, actors, they have failed. How you bounce back from that, is what is important,” he said.
Trade analyst Komal Nahta recently said that the collections of Akshay Kumar and Veer Pahariya-starrer film Sky Force were inflated via block bookings. “The total for 1st week was Rs. 40.50 crore. Of course, the records will show total collections of Rs. 80 crore but that’s because heavy block booking of the unsold tickets was done on each single day of the first week to give the impression that the film was performing extraordinarily at the ticket counters. This was, perhaps, the maximum block bookings anyone had ever done in the history of Bollywood,” he shared.
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