Occasionally, we would watch a movie in an actual theatre. It was magic! Huge screens, colours, air conditioning and a larger-than-life hero fixing the bad guys and romancing his girl. Nothing matched this entertainment experience. The people who acted in movies weren’t humans. We called them – stars!
Fast forward to 2022. There are hundreds of TV channels. You hardly watch any. It’s better to watch on-demand streaming services. There are a dozen of them, each pumping out hundreds of movies and serialized shows. From your phone to your TV, watch anywhere, anytime you want. However, you don’t even get time to watch web-series anymore. They take hours to finish. When bored, you just whip out your phone to open Instagram reels or Youtube shorts. You watch a selection of 1-min film clips, for however many minutes you want. These clips are curated. Cooking, travelling, puppies or diabetes – the app knows what you like and shows you exactly that. Twenty minutes to kill – no problem. Just whip out your phone. There’s longer content on Youtube too, again suggested based on what is relevant to you. There are Youtubers, who have built a massive following making lo-cost, simple, relevant videos. They don’t need massive sets, entourage, and makeup. The media doesn’t chase these youtubers. It doesn’t ask them if their wives are pregnant or where they went on holiday. Yet, these Youtubers are as big and more charismatic than some Bollywood stars. And they are free and more convenient to watch!
Welcome to the new reality of the entertainment business. We have come from an era of an entertainment-starved to an entertainment-saturated society.
Your attention is the most valuable commodity. Everyone wants it. And there’s only so much of it. Most of your attention goes into running your life – doing your work, managing your daily routines. There’s some attention left, which is available for entertainment. And there’s now a war for it. Trillion-dollar corporations work on getting your attention. Millions of content creators want and take some of that attention. There’s Youtubers, memers, podcasters, influencers, and of course your own friends and families, who post content and take away some of your precious attention.
And if you still have attention left – there’s OTT platforms, books, radio, live-entertainment and social media. Oh, and then there’s Bollywood. Yes, it’s one of the options.
Somehow, this reality hasn’t hit Bollywood. That once movies were the only little oasis of water in an entertainment starved desert. Today, they are just one of the hundreds of varieties of bottled water available at your doorstep, where everyone is begging you to try their water.
Whether it is star renumeration or the entitled, privileged and clueless attitude of some of the actors, it all still reflects an era when films were the top shelf when it came to entertainment. Today, it is only one item in a stuffed supermarket. Time to wake up maybe?
There are many consequences of this denial. First, there’s massive losses in the industry when movies are not priced right. Two, the smug, we are better than you attitude irritates the audience – hence the rather harsh and unfair #boycott trends. Three, there’s no evolution. Exceptions are still cited as reasons for keeping things the way they are. ‘Oh, but that movie did well’. Well, ten others didn’t. ‘Oh but South movies are doing so well.’ Yes, a few do, most don’t. The internet allows certain regional to get noticed and get viral. It doesn’t mean things are like the past.
The fundamental, philosophical question is this – today, do we even need so much entertainment? Does it make sense to risk hundreds of crores in yet another unremarkable story when society doesn’t really care anymore? Do we need to worship some actors, covering them as if they were royalty?
Change is a part of life. Live circuses were big once. They barely exist anymore. They had to accept reality. Everything – radio, TV, books, newspapers, magazines – has had to accept the reality of an entertainment glut.
Bollywood needs to as well. That will allow it to morph into something more relevant for today. Some high-spectacle or high-concept movies will work will too. Budgets and massive actor renumerations will have to be reworked. This morphing will result in a more relevant, sustainable Bollywood.
It’s good to be humble in life. To realize that one is dispensable. That one is not superior to the others, but simply another option. It is good if we learn these lessons ourselves in life. If not, well, as they say – the audience is God. And God always has a way of teaching you the lessons you need to learn in life.