The Indian Film Industry or Bollywood is often seen arguing about commercial cinemas versus the offbeat movies. Which movie deserves to be placed over the higher pedestal is an important question to answer. The movies generate higher revenues and attract more audience or the movies, which are critically acclaimed and get awards at different prestigious award platforms. Well, let us check a comparison of the two as under:
Media’s stance over different Bollywood movies
In India, you will not find the media taking much of its sense regarding their choices and its understanding about the cinema, so it is difficult for them to consider the critically acclaimed movies so seriously. The important question, is the media competent enough to understand the audience’s pulse found for Bollywood movies? Anyone watching the movie in a single screen would have a different perspective than anyone watching inside any multiplex. In today’s information age, everyone seems to have become a critic and they air their views through their social media profiles (Twitter and Facebook). Is the audience catching up different movies really first check the reviews before going to watch any movie? Well, most of the time, it is the trailer of the movie, which decides the seriousness of the audience and rest relies over the word of mouth.
Higher revenue the yardstick of any movie’s success
The audience is also not that competent to understand the difference between these two types of movies. They hardly care who gets the award for the critically acclaimed movies, while the actors too are not seen taking them seriously. Every corporate is seen giving awards for their employees in their respective business organization in order to motivate them. However, the actors getting the award even forget why they were applauded with any particular award. The commercial success is the only yardstick, which the moviemakers consider while producing the movie. After all, they are making movies to make money and not to impress the critics and get acclaimed for making really good movies. In other words, both the filmmaker and audience consider the commerce element as the important element to judge any movie’s success.
The audience perspective about movies
You could often witness a number of wars and differences among the stars and actors. The stars can be in the position of doing some offbeat cinema and even attract more amount of audience for these movies, however, will the same actor does the commercial film and succeed is an important question to ask. Well, in majority of the cases, these actors would fail for sure. Whether you hate or love it but the fact is you can find the audience liking the charming actors and sensual actress more on the silver screens than the average looking actors of B Town. Consider for instance the case of Nawazzudin Siddiqui, he may be easily considered for the roles of Gangs of Wasseypur but may fail to fetch the characters of Raj or Rahul, which SRK is known to perform. Similarly, the audience would watch more the females like Deepika Padukone (especially when she is known to show her cleXvage more than anyone in B Town), or Katrina than actresses like Kalki Kolchein, Richa Chadda or Konkana Sen. Despite knowing that the latter group of actresses are better in acting and performance the audience fail to catch them.
The Piracy element
Though you may find people applauding any critically acclaimed movies, however, the audience may not like to catch up these movies in the Multiplex or even single screen. Well, let me ask, how many of you all have gone to watch Katiyabaz or Identity Card in the theatres despite knowing the fact that these movies have tangible content as compared to the movies like Creature 3D or similar movie of B Town. In fact, the max the audience would do today is to download these critically acclaimed movies on their laptops and watch them in their free time thus boosting up the piracy element. The same they would not prefer doing for big banner movies, which are merely made for commercial gains. People simply like to watch movies from actors like the three Khans (Aamir, Salman and SRK) or of Hrithik Roshan, Akshay Kumar or Ranbir Kapoor considering their star value. There are hardly any top actor who volunteer to experiment and feel like doing some offbeat movies rather than doing only the commercial movies, which lack content but have sensual and masala elements in it.
Wrapping up
People going with friends and family do not prefer to watch the offbeat movies but catch up the masala commercial movies. The offbeat movies generally do not have masala or bold content for anyone to enjoy and ease their eyes. Making such movies can be called as a big art for any filmmaker, however, for any audience; it can be called just a medium that entertains you. The actors like Nawazuddin Siddiqui or Irrfan Khan are good actors who do off beat movies, but people would never watch them. On the other side, there are only few top stars like Aamir or Ranbir Kapoor who do offbeat movies rather than doing only the commercial ones. If the top actors will start doing offbeat movies, the real charm of Bollywood can be easily revived unlike the way we see in Hollywood.
