IPL shines, Bollywood fades!

Just rewind the time to 2007, India had two kinds of fanatics: Cricket fanatics & Bollywood fanatics. These are clearly two different categories to fantasy. Cricket was supposedly a 5-day test match or a 50-50 over ODI and a commercial movie was typically 2-3 hours movie. Those were the days of 2007. Then the world witnessed, the opening ceremony of glamour-studded Indian Premier League. And the two markets commingled into each other. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs, reducing the game to the length of a three-hour movie, and Cricket became the biggest competitor to Bollywood.

Today, the IPL season is indeed the most dreadful time for Bollywood as it can’t blame Cricket in particular since both markets are One now. Its a vicious circle at the end. As IPL season is on, big (banner/budget/star) movies are remaining away from the release and due to this, the other medium and smaller films are coming into the available vacant slots. Due to coming together of so many films, (most of the) buyers are thinking thrice about investing any more money into the promotion. Due to lack of promotion, audience are not even aware about the release dates, let aside getting enticed enough to step into theaters. And due to empty theaters, the Bollywood is facing the most dreadful time.

Desperate multiplex owners requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang on to the audience. If the IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, films would have to sequence their releases so as to not clash with IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned, both are a three-hour-star-studded-entertainment. Cricket season might push films out of the market.

But is it correct to blame only Cricket for this terrible Bollywood time? Why not have a big Bollywood movie like a Shahrukh-Aamir-Salman-starring dare to release during this IPL season? If that does happen, will the situation not see a major upswing? Won’t a viewer come out of home and step into the dark auditorium to land into the world of fantasy? Won’t the situation completely reverse and IPL get defeated off the ground? Why make excuses when you haven’t tried at all?

Truely speaking one can’t blame the makers of the films which apparently didn’t even go all out in their marketing and promotional campaign. These medium and smaller films may not be masterpieces in the offering but if all promotional campaigns go properly, they deserved more than they fetch from empty theater.

Well, the only introspection point is, the next time a sporting or any other event is blamed, one should observe what film industry is itself doing to its products coming out every Friday!