Is Film industry business model up for a change?

With big budgeted movies in Bollywood failing in box office, I was wondering, is it time to rethink on film business model?.


If one looks a film industry couple decades back, film was the only entertainment for the public. TV was not a big entertainer, color TV was just venturing in and public had to content with Doordarshan, hence public did not have much options and added to it unlike now, film tickets which are are sold at Rs 150~200 plus, the film tickets were priced at about Rs 20 earlier. Naturally, people were inclined to visit theatres for entertainment.

If you look at a situation now, for family to watch a movies, a family of 4 might have to spend about Rs 1000 which includes ticket, car parking and some munching. Nowadays, TV has all features of a home theatre & a fine print DVD are available at cheaper price. Off course, one has to stop movie piracy, which is not an easy job, to me its something like asking a person to come to bank to withdraw money and to avoid using ATM.

Why not the film industry look at producing what the customer wants? I meant, can a film producer produce a short movie for 1 hour and sell it in a DVD format priced at Rs 100. There are DVD/CD copy protection encryption software, which can prevent copying and more over if it priced at Rs 100, further its may not worth the effort for coping low priced media illegally. Producer can think of getting corporate sponsorship, just like India TV serials and for sure for these movie story value and entertainment is important, rather than hero, heroine or songs or 3 unnecessary fight. Further, I don't think distribution is a challenge for DVD formatted movies, when pre-paid sim card can be sold in a small shop, why not these DVD. There need to be some marketing effort and the producers can look at some innovations, like using blogger.

If film industry want to attract public to theaters the better option is to produce movies like 'Avatar' which might not have the same visual effect when watched on TV, in which case definitely public will opt for theater.

Well, with real estate pricing having gone up by 200~400% over the last few years, the business viability of theater itself can be a question mark.

Quite recently, one of my colleague told about this funny short movie, hope you would enjoy it too, particularly if you understand Tamil. This has all the ingredient of what I was thinking about short movie and may be the producer has not sold it commercially, as embed code was available in youtube & their website.

Jakkuboys - The Movie from Scube Productions on Vimeo.