Has the money [in the ecosystem] shrunk, altogether? Why has everyone been saying the OTT party’s over?” I ask Manish Menghani, who heads content licensing at Amazon Prime Video.
Yup, it might sound rude. But the question comes from a fair space.
Which is a rant on behalf of the customer — and that’s what journalists often do, whether covering the BMC or Bollywood/entertainment. The latter directly affects professional lives of at least a million-plus in Mumbai.
The crowd gathered before us for a panel discussion on movie distribution are predominantly independent filmmakers, usually an antsy lot, at NFDC’s Waves Film Bazaar, in Goa.
It’s possibly the most productive Indian marketplace, annually, for buyers/sellers of content/ideas, lasting four days. Call it ‘chaar din ki chandni, phir Andheri raat’, if you may!
Menghani says, “It’s not that [the money has shrunk]. You plan programming, two-three years ahead. There was an expectation, and the valuation based on that future performance (of content on the platform) didn’t live up to it.
“The jolt [in the system] is that everything, now, is performance linked. Likewise, box-office linked.”
The latter was chiefly the reason, just few days ago — after a muted release of Kanu Behl’s Cannes-selection, Agra — 46 Indian filmmakers got together to petition for parity with screenings at cinemas/multiplexes.
Let’s name this Agra summit.
The conflict being the usual chicken-egg stuff. Theatres shaft indies, by way of shows/slots, etc. OTTs slash them, further, for failing the box-office test.
Either way, the bloke, who spent years on a story to tell, sits down to wonder if they can endure this forever.
But then again, as Aparna Purohit, who leads Aamir Khan Productions, rightly put it to the audience, “You didn’t wait for us to commission your film. You went ahead, and made it. Now, let’s just figure how to reach out to larger numbers.”
Frankly, you could argue, the world owes the artiste nothing — and so what if they chose self-expression over circus/mass entertainment, right? Wrong.
I understand theatres are primarily a business. But are they only a business — simply auditoriums, selling snacks?
Are they not equally a part of the entertainment ecosystem, with a natural responsibility, thus, to push fresher, lesser tested talents — for, how else do you expect movies to get sustainably better/diverse, for the viewer, in the long run?
Besides that soft corner for at least a single 6 pm show for supposed indies, as petitioned by indie filmmakers — I’d suggest theatres should even screen a curated, special short film, before features, to push newer voices still.
So many out there. Allow audiences to discover. That’s how you pay it forward, to a creative community you earn your bucks from; no?
“You can’t push beyond a point too. We don’t want multiplexes shutting down the way so many cinemas did,” Aashish Singh, CEO, Red Chillies, says. True that.
Devang Sampat from the multiplex chain, Cinepolis, was meant to be on the same panel. He had to back out in the last minute. Glad for him.
I suspect this audience would’ve descended on the solitary Mr Sampath, having to take many for the team! But is this theatre lafda merely an ancient indie concern? More often than not, mainstream movies suffer as well.
Intuitively, if distribution is the gap, then where are the distributors? I’m told, at the Waves Film Bazaar, there were around 260 producers — and two distributors! Haven’t fact-checked. It sounds about right.
In commercial Bollywood, for instance, distributors used to be at the centre of the creative economy. So much so that, up until his film Kaabil (2017), as producer, Rakesh Roshan once told me, he’d directly raise money from distributors from the 14 territories in the country to make films.
Those distributors, in turn, taking full ownership of the said films, in their territories, would heavily hustle for its best possible release, sharply targeting prints, publicity….
With indies, of course, it’s the subscription-based OTTs that were meant to champion the films, heralding a revolution for self-expression of sorts. Red Chillies’ Singh says, “There are really two-three (OTT) players even buying films.”
In his defence, Prime Video’s Menghani argues there are multiple ways for filmmakers to go direct-to-service, rather than commercially risking theatres. One of which is getting remunerated, through a dashboard, for the number of hours viewed.
The ongoing tussle between commercial cinema and OTT, of course, is over the number of weeks it takes the film to land on the streamer, following theatrical release.
But isn’t there the world of internet out there, with people on their phones consuming, what else, but content, all day?
That’s who Aamir Khan directly approached, after theatrical run of Sitaare Zameen Par (2025), with pay-per-view on YouTube, that everybody accesses. How did that experiment go? By the looks of it, perhaps, not too well.
Purohit, who led this move for her company, says selling TV rights for the film has become a challenge, since it’s already out there: “But you’ve gotta keep at it. One experiment is not gonna open gates.”
She reveals, “Has Sitaare Zameen Par done the expected business? It hasn’t. It’s done 20x (of the revenues) of a film on TVOD (Transactional Video on Demand). But what is that? Nothing.”
Mayank Shekhar attempts to make sense of mass culture.
He tweets @mayankw14 Send your feedback to mailbag@mid-day.com
The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.