Film industry across the nation has been waiting to hear the good news with respect to the control of Covid, so that the theatres can be opened.
But there seems to be no light at the end of the tunnel. If this continues really for another year, there are plenty of chances that people may develop a disconnect to outside viewing of films as they get habituated to home viewing. On the top of it, OTTs and ATTs are rising in number.
One of the top directors of Bollywood Shekhar Kapur implies that the theatre system is almost dead at least for a year.
He tweeted- "Theatres are not going to open for at least a year. So all hype around the first weeks business of 100+ crores is dead. So the theatrical Star System is dead. Stars will have to go to existing OTT platforms or stream films themselves through their own apps. Technology is quite simple"
To this Ram Gopal Varma replied, "That sounds pretty much like a doomsday prediction for an era".
It goes without saying that the big stars should come out to open up their own Apps as the offers being given by OTTs are not making any break even.
Even on ATTs it is not sure if they can make huge sums as they used to make in theatres' era, by distributing the losses to producers and distributors. Here on their own ATT, there wouldn't be anyone to share the loss or gain.
Effective costs, effective content and effective attention pulling campaign are must and should to see profits on ATTs/OTTs. We need to see how the Stars come down from the sky and walk on earth.
