This offsets the higher cost involved in making a film with the superstar. There were no takers for the rights of nearly 70 films, according to industry sources.įilms with a superstar earn more from satellite rights. "Now the channels are imposing restrictions and are not willing to open their purse strings for a movie which has not been made well," points out MM Hamsa, secretary of Film Distributors Association of Kerala. But this did not work out all the time though channels vied with one another to buy the latest movie. Films were made without much homework with the expectation that the rights will be purchased by a channel for a hefty sum.
Thanks to the proliferation of TV channels in Malayalam, satellite rights have assumed significance in the film industry. There is other evidence that the scramble for movies will be shortlived.
But how many production companies are there which are that old?" he asks. "There are 70- or 80-year-old theatres in the state.
Kumar says the spoils were shared by actors, technicians and theatre owners while producers were left ruing their losses. "They backed many half-baked ideas and the net result was the huge loss suffered by the industry," he says. According to Suresh Kumar there were nearly 80 new producers last year. Though new producers emerged, which led to the record production of movies, it failed to cheer the industry as a majority of films bombed.
"But many films failed at the box office and did not get the money they expected from the satellite rights," says Liberty Basheer, president of Kerala Film Exhibitors Federation. In fact, most films were produced with the intention of recovering a significant part of the cost through satellite rights purchased by TV channels. With competition driving out most of the films from the theatre, the industry had only the income from satellite rights to bank on. "This year we will have 23 screens altogether and our focus will be tier II cities in the state," he says.įilm industry spokesmen, however, argue that the income from multiplexes can only be a supplement to the main income, that is, from the satellite rights and from theatres. Enthused by the success of their venture in a tier II city like Angamaly, the Carnival Group is opening multiplexes in other towns. The Mumbai-based Carnival Group, which had opened a three-screen multiplex in Angamaly, a satellite town of Kochi, could make the town an important release centre, according to its CEO and director Sunil PV. The multiplex movement that has taken root in the state has been a major relief for the industry in this context. He too, however, agrees that the large number of releases in Malayalam (along with the films from other languages) affected the performance of movies on the box office. According to him, it was the talks that Kumar had with the theatre owners that led to the improved facilities. "The credit for this trend should be given to former minister for cinema, sports and forests KB Ganesh Kumar," says Edavela Babu, secretary of the Association of Malayalam Movie Artists. Nevertheless, the investment that theatre owners made to improve facilities ensured people returned to cinema halls in large numbers. To top it, the costs of filmmaking have gone up by 25% in the past one to two years with the remuneration of the technicians increasing by almost 50 %, says Kumar. The result was that the theatre revenue of a majority of films was pathetic. According to Kumar, the simultaneous release of films led to the removal of many from the theatre even before they could run for a week. The Malayalam film industry was impervious to the trend of new movies nudging incumbents from theatres. The culprit ironically is the breakneck filmmaking. with a Spurt Over the Past Two Years), low production costs alone can’t explain the trend. But judging by the steady increase in the number of movies produced in recent years (see. The average cost of making a Malayalam film is around Rs 3 crore, a pittance compared with other film industries, where actor fees alone scale Rs 10 crore. In many ways, the furious pace of filmmaking in Malayalam should not be surprising. Bollywood, considered the final word in Indian film industry, had 122 releases in 2013. Movies in Malayalam beat the usual suspects - Telegu, Tamil and Kannada (see Malayalam Tops the Charts.). In 2013, a record 158 films were released in Malayalam. Remember that the size of Malayalam cinema industry is a fraction of Bollywood or for that matter its counterparts in south India. The Malayalam film industry produced the largest number of films, no mean achievement for an industry whose language is spoken by less than 3% of the people in the country. Rarely do Malayalam movies receive ink than during the runup to the national awards.