May 31, 2010 (Sampurn Wire): Ever since the strike which took place last year, there has been one common phenomenon week after week. There is a constant inflow of garbage that has taken place practically every Friday. The truth though was that in majority of instances, shows had to be cancelled on the opening day or at maximum the films were discontinued by the time first weekend got to a close. Still, nondescript films like ‘Meri Padosan’, ‘Coffee House’, ‘Ek Se Bure Do’ or more recently ‘Kuch Kariye’, ‘Muskurake Dekh’ or ‘Vroom’ have made it to the theaters.
This shows that there has been no dearth of software, whether good or bad, in the industry. Some of these films have waited for a period when there are no big releases, some have battled the Ramzan/Shraddh time period while a few (case in point being ‘Chase’) have even dared to come face to face with a biggie (‘Housefull’). However, for the first time in last 12-15 months, there has been a situation when not a single notable film (you read it right) arrived in theaters.
This happened over the week gone by when no new notable film saw an arrival in multiplexes or single screen theaters across the country. It was the ‘Kites’ effect as everyone in the industry believed that it would come arrive like a hurricane and stake its claim all over box office for at least two weeks in a row. This is the reason why an empty space was created for the film and even exhibitors wanted to harness this time period to earn maximum moolah rather than risk loosing their investment by allowing screen time to some other film.
While the fate of ‘Kites’ is known to one and all (more about that later), the films that benefited most (to some extent only though) were ‘Badmaash Company’ and ‘Housefull’. Not that they had any revival of fortunes and ended up seeing huge escalation in collections. Still, they were prevented from getting entirely steam rolled, something that looked like the situation till a week before the release of ‘Kites’.
Well, it is not for no reason that Bollywood is termed as a ground for unpredictability for so many decades now!
— Rudhir Burman / Sampurn Wire
