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As the saying goes every long journey starts with a small step, and I am really happy that somebody like Vidhu Vinod Chopra, Rajkumar Hirani and UTV have taken the initiative and roped in Rentrack to reveal the correct box-office collections of PK. In this way, I am sure that it will help to reign in the wrongdoing in our system. In a bid to show one upmanship, the industry has been compromising on the transparency front. Many times, it is the producers who influence collections and give out information to the media talking about the biggest opening day collection of the film, etc. This is the reason why film-makers have shied away from a software like Rentrak. But with this initiative, I think it is a great beginning and I hope that other producers will also follow suit.
Earlier, the box-office collections were not in the public domain. It was with the advent of the corporates talking about Rs.100 crore lifetime business etc that people got into the silly rat race. Although there was a software that was keeping track of box-office collections earlier, it was done on a small scale. That the industry had not thought about getting a system like Rentrack in place could be attributed to the will of the trade. If every distributor, exhibitor and producer thinks about ‘let’s have transparency’, this whole system would have been in place decades ago.
Rentrack will provide a great deal of transparency across the scene right from the distributor level to the exhibitors, producers and the studios. But what ultimately matters is the intention of providing honest reports regarding collections, and this should be done at every level. And I am sure that Rentrack will play a significant role in streamlining the system, but ultimately, it is the change in the value stream that will make a difference.
Manipulating figures will stop as Rentrack directly captures the collections that are fed in. Whether we like it or not, there are exhibitors in a lot of places who cut collections and who don’t showcase the entire figures to siphon away part of the profits. Those are instances that Rentrack can do nothing about. It can only make a compilation of the collections that are fed into it. When the tabulation of the collections happen manually, you can forge the numbers and fool the trade for a while, but in the end, you are fooling yourselves by misreporting collections. This system will not make any difference to those who are being honest in their dealings and business. In fact, it will make things easier, because rather than manually making reports and sending them, they will have a technical simplified software and expertise of Rentrack to do it. But for those, who are not being honest and transparent in the way they work, it is not one of the most pleasant things to have happened. But as they say, whenever any good happens there are people who will try to find a way around it. Take for instance, the case of the whole digital cinema and piracy issue; the pirates still found a way to get good copies of the film and sell them on DVDs. So, it is a constant battle that will be fought. At least, it is a good beginning, and with a film like PK, that step has finally been taken.
Tampering with BO collections is primarily an Indian phenomenon as compared to the West. Here everyone seems to be in a rat race to showcase the highest opening day number, the highest weekend collections etc. Nobody seems to be interested in improving footfalls which is the ultimate solution for improving business.
As told to Farida Khanzada
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