 "Jawan movie")
Atlee’s Jawan is about a vigilante jailer out to correct political and social ills. Shah Rukh Khan (in a double role) plays jailer Azad and his dad Vikram Rathore with elan. The film, released on September 7, reminds you of Amitabh Bachchan’s anti-establishment hits like Deewar and Hum. More than its cinematic merit, Jawan is an emphatic illustration of the two things that are expanding the audience for Indian movies — the rise of the pan-Indian/global film and the revival of single screens.
Within 12 days of its release, Jawan collected Rs 860 crore at the box office globally. Just like Khan’s Pathaan, which released in January this year, Jawan too will comfortably cross Rs 1,000 crore in worldwide gross. The question now is whether it can beat Dangal’s (2016) record of over Rs 2,200 crore. Note that box office collection is simply tickets sold, not the revenue of a film. After deducting trade (theatres, multiplexes, distributors) share, and taxes, roughly a third of the money collected comes to the producers.
Jawan’s success soon after Pathaan, Rocky aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani, OMG2, and Gadar2 signals Hindi cinema is back in the game. Of the Rs 19,100 crore in total revenue the film business made in 2019, Hindi had the largest share at over 50 per cent. Total revenue is the money films make from TV, streaming, music, and the sale of tickets. The pandemic sent revenues crashing down to Rs 7,200 crore in 2020. Pushpa (Telugu) and Master (Tamil) helped push it to Rs 9,300 crore in 2021. However, lockdowns and new variants meant that many films, each taking 18-36 months to make, were stuck midway.
In many ways, 2023 is the first normal year with production resuming full throttle. The business should close the year with Rs 20,000 crore, maybe much more, in total revenue.
Many are suspicious of the numbers for recent hits. If the collection for Jawan, or RRR, or Drihsyam 2 seems unusually large, it is because the market for “Indian cinema” — not Hindi, Telugu or Tamil cinema but “Indian cinema” —has grown. Of the Rs 900 crore worth of tickets RRR sold in India, about Rs 340 crore were primarily in Hindi markets. RRR, Pushpa, Jawan, K.G.F Chapter 2, and Pathaan were designed as pan-Indian films. They have a cast and crew from different language cinemas. They were either shot bilingually or can be watched in Hindi, Telugu, Tamil or Kannada. This rarely happened before.
These domestic crossovers have been in the making for decades. For years, both Hindi and South Indian filmmakers tried their hand at pan-Indian films but both storytellers and the audience were not ready. Andha Kanoon (1983, Rajnikant and Amitabh Bachchan) or Sadma (1983, Kamal Hasan and Sridevi) were exceptions. By the turn of the millennium, Hindi general entertainment channels started offering dubbed versions of Tamil and Telugu films. This brought in a large audience from the Hindi belt. When streaming took off in 2016, all kinds of Indian films — Hindi, Tamil, Bengali, Telugu, Marathi — began to find an audience outside their core markets. Not surprisingly, over half the viewership of Indian language films on Amazon Prime Video comes from regions beyond their home state.
This foundation has led to a market where the audience does not see Pushpa as a Telugu film or Jawan solely as a Hindi film. This has meant more tickets sold and, therefore, more revenues. The 994 million tickets sold in 2022 are just over two-thirds of the 1.46 billion sold in 2019. This year should see it crossing that comfortably because of what pan-Indian films are doing to single screens.
India has seen a decline in the number of screens, from 10,000 over a decade ago to about 8,700 screens, with just about 5,000 being single screens. They closed at an alarming rate, with over 500 shutting down during the pandemic. But films like Pathaan led to the reopening of 25 single screens. Gadar2, OMG2, Jawan likely brought some more alive. As the massy pan-Indian film takes off, single screens are reasserting their economic power.
Indian films are crossing over internationally as well. Approximately half of Jawan’s box office gross (thus far) came from overseas markets, including the US, Europe, the UK, and Central Asia. Ditto for Siddarth Anand’s Pathaan, and Karan Johar’s Rocky aur Rani Ki Prem Kahani. The overseas market, which had nearly disappeared, is making a comeback, and this time it is not limited to the diaspora. Streaming platforms have created a broader global context for Indian shows and films. After a successful theatrical run, RRR was in the global top 10 on Netflix for 18 weeks. Almost every major Indian release is now reviewed in the world’s top trade and news brands, from Variety and Hollywood Reporter to The Guardian and The New York Times.
This international crossover success is also the result of decades of hard work by a handful of people who found distributors, screens, and spent in dollars for print and publicity. In the late 1990s and the first decade of the millennium, Khan, Johar and (late) Yash Chopra dominated this market. An analysis I conducted for a research paper in 2013 found that from 2002 to 2012, over half the money Indian films made overseas came from Khan’s films. Rajnikant is popular in Southeast Asia and Japan. About half the total gross of his latest hit, Jailer, is from markets outside India. This is wonderful news because the value of the dollar means that the $62 million Pathaan grossed worldwide converts to Rs 500 crore.
More Indians and non-Indians are now watching our films on more screens. This happy market expansion is what the numbers reflect.
http://twitter.com/vanitakohlik
Disclaimer: These are personal views of the writer. They do not necessarily reflect the opinion of www.business-standard.com or the Business Standard newspaper
