When films premiere inside your homes

Nonika Singh

Only the other day, Netflix announced a bouquet of 12 films. Amazon Prime and Disney Hotstar are equally well placed in the race. With a slew of movies releasing on streaming giants, who can dispute that the box-office has shifted home. However, one wonders who gains and who loses in this new dynamics, where films are going the digital way.

Atul Mohan, a trade analyst and editor of Complete Cinema, says only a mutually beneficial relationship can sustain. He says that while OTT platforms are constantly on the lookout for fresh content, “movies are a perishable commodity”. Precisely why Rajat Agrawal, creative head of Ultra Media and Entertainment and producer of Chippa (streaming on Netflix), feels the dice are loaded in favour of streaming giants.

Producers are queuing up for digital release of their films, but are certainly not offloading at a loss. Many of them seem to be big gainers in this space too. Rahul Mittra’s Sanjay Dutt-starrer Torbaaz has been acquired by Netflix. Without putting a number, he insists that it has been a profitable proposition for him. But what do OTT platforms gain when they acquire films en bloc, that too at a premium far exceeding what they would have coughed up had the movie come to them after theatrical release? The answer is: more subscribers. While the AVOD (ad-based video on demand) model is alive among smaller platforms, bigger players work on subscription and valuation model. In February 2020, Netflix had 167 million subscribers worldwide. The number has now jumped to seven million short of 200. In 2019, Amazon Prime Video’s projected base was close to 75 million and that of players like Alt Balaji and Eros Now varied between 18 and 20 million. Clearly, satiating the tastes of such a humongous audience can’t be easy. Exclusive content holds the key. Netflix is projected to spend 17 billion dollars on content in 2020 and picking up new titles and investing in originals is a logical way forward.

One of the lead players, Disney Hotstar, has picked up seven big ticket Bollywood films, including Akshay Kumar’s Laxmmi Bomb, to boost its growing base. Optics is so important that to score points in the ‘sentiments game’, Sushant Singh Rajput-starrer Dil Bechara, produced by sister concern Foxstar, will also be available to non-subscribers.

How much was a film bought for may remain a guarded secret, but the grapevine invariably puts out numbers. Figures floating in the market suggest Gulabo Sitabo was sold for Rs65 crore, Gunjan Saxena, The Kargil Girl for Rs50 crore and, believe it or not, Rs125 crore is the price being put on Laxmmi Bomb.

Producers like Mittra may insist that stars hold little value on this global stage and that OTT platforms would eventually demolish the star system, others don’t quite agree. “Stars will always be important,” says Mohan. Film writer and box-office expert Komal Nahta adds, “Let us not forget that the cine-going audience, which is what the streamers are targeting, is the same. Hence, star value can never be undermined.” So an Amitabh Bachchan film will gain more traction, an Akshay Kumar more eyeballs and an Ajay Devgn-starrer Bhuj could walk away with the Rs100 crore-plus price tag.

Revenue models, however, are forever evolving and strategising depends on a whole lot of factors. Terms like daily and monthly average are pretty common in assessing what viewers want. However, the platforms are recalcitrant to share their results of data mining. Once in a while they do ‘leak’ information though. So you may come to know that the Netflix’s Irishman was watched by 64 million and that Extraction, at a staggering 99 million, is its most watched film.

In the absence of clear-cut definitions of hit or flop, the important determinant, Mittra observes, is “social media buzz.” Only, though Nahta feels OTTs are taking chances as a film could be accepted or rejected (by audiences), others believe there are no immediate gainers or losers. Ramifications could be felt much later. Amortisation is the word in this industry where broadcasters such as Sony and Zee with OTT verticals (SonyLiv and Zee5 respectively) are in a position of leveraging their advantage.

In the post-Covid world, consolidation could lead to new equations. With Jio TV, promising to offer content from more than 12 global OTT players around the corner, Nahta says “some cannibalisation could happen”. But those firmly entrenched in the new ‘anytime ecosystem of entertainment’ would certainly survive. And so would Bollywood, if the tidy sum of Rs570 crore, which the makers are said to have picked up from 10 films alone, is any indicator.

Nahta says movie premieres on OTT are a passing phase, but could go a long way in building brands. And if, as Ashley Friedlein says, brand is the sum total of how someone perceives a particular organisation, branding is about shaping that perception. To paraphrase Elon Musk, right now, the OTTs are in the race to match perception with reality.