Although we are thousands of miles of away from our motherland, we are fortunate that we are able to continue enjoying telugu movies of our favorite stars and other nice movies. First, we have to thank the movie producers, distributors who are taking overseas rights for these movies and local distributors who are playing these movies in their cities and of course websites like Great Andhra for daring to write and providing honest reviews.
But, there is a stark reality which every person who loves telugu cinema should know. That is the current pathetic situation of the telugu movie business overseas. Let us not get into the discussion of who started this – chicken or egg? We never know. But, the reality is that it is time to wake up and get back to senses. This article is coming out after being acknowledged by local distributors from several cities in USA along with UK, Australia and Dubai. I am sure several other distributors will agree after reading through.
Take a look at the movie market overseas (especially USA) - Several Andhrites in USA are drastically effected by the severe blow on US economy. Some are returning back to India and some are waiting to get back into new jobs. The lucky ones who still have jobs are very cautious in how they spend. Movie goers have become very judicious and doing their ‘research’ before coming out to theaters and spending their hard earned money on the movies. Recent days, people started ignoring even average movies with ratings above 3.0. In this scenario, the purchasing power (should we say ‘movie watching power’) of the customers has decreased tremendously and at the same time the selling price of the movies has increased enormously. This doesn’t make sense when you apply common business logic of demand and supply. This will only make sense when you take into consideration the ignorance and gullible nature of the local movie distributors who are falling into the trap of Overseas Distributors just because of the sheer passion for movies and lack of research into collections for previous movies. If you look back at the year 2008, there are hardly any movies which brought profits to local distributors. Even for hit movies like Ready, Jalsa and King, the local distributors made very minimal profits and in some areas even lost their money. This is because of the huge price tags stuck on them by Overseas Distributors. Here are some of the facts-
- Overseas Distributors are buying the movies for exorbitant prices without taking into consideration the real market potential. There are instances where some distributors are approaching the producers for movies that are already sold out and offering more money and acquiring the overseas rights. Who will bear these additional costs? Ultimately, it will be the local buyers who will be lured into buying the movie and pay extra price to cover those reckless purchases. This is one of the reasons for increasing the ticket prices from $10 to $12 and $16 in some areas.
- There are some distributors who are bundling up mediocre movies with crazy products and pushing the buyers to buy the movies as a bundle for a hefty price. Even if one movie does well, buyers are still losing heavily because of the big amounts they paid.
- There are recent instances where one well known distributor sold away the movie rights of an upcoming big star movie by saying that they already purchased the movie when in reality they did not get those rights.
- The latest sales pitch is the collections of movie Magadheera. We all know that Overseas Distributors are trying to persuade buyers by showing the numbers for Magadheera movie and artificially inflating the ‘viwership’ of an area. Well, you cannot take Magadheera collections into consideration when looking into buying a movie for your area. That movie is an exception and a rare event. You cannot expect all movies to get the same amount of craze and collections as that movie. Just look at the recent disaster of a hotshot director (failure of this movie is blamed on the wrong selection of heroine). Buyers were lured into buying this movie by showing the success rate of Magadheera movie and many new/first time buyers fell for this and eventually lost big sums of money on this movie.
- Lost money on a movie? Sorry, you are on your own. Be aware that the distributor who sold the movie to you with all kinds of false promises about long term relation will no longer respond to your phone calls. He will instead spend the time to find a new ‘bakra’ and repeat the process.
As people who distributed telugu movies for several years, we felt that it is our moral responsibility to be vocal about this urgent issue, as we have been seeing several fellow Andhrites eagerly buying movies and burning their hands and sometimes losing several years of their hard earned money. As much bigger and crazy movies line up for release, buyers have to be aware that bigger the movie bigger the loss if the movie does not fare well at box office. Please use caution and simple presence of mind while you look forward to buying these movies. Be sure to find out real box office collections of the recent telugu movies in your city. Don’t fall prey for the wrong collections quoted by the seller, ‘unique’ qualities of the movie listed by the seller and false promises to help you out if you lose money (that will never happen). Not all Overseas Distributors are like this. There is one major distribution group in particular which has recently become infamous for these illicit practices. It is time that we all get back to senses, be cautious, be responsible and be reasonable in selling/buying telugu movies so that each and every telugu movie lover will have a pleasant movie-going experience in USA.
Regards,
Local Telugu Movie Distributors.
USA, UK, Australia and Dubai.
The views expressed in the article are the author's and not of greatandhra.com.
