‘Jawan’ and ‘RARKPK’ could fill Bollywood coffers briefly at best

livemint.com:

₹11. In 1997, I saw Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World at Anupam Cinema in Delhi. The ticket was priced at an unheard of ₹75.

Of course, Anupam was India’s first multiplex. What was peculiar to Anupam then gradually became the norm. Multiplexes sprung up all over the country.

The cost of viewing was much higher than what single-screen halls used to charge. Nonetheless, unlike many single-screen halls, their air-conditioners and sound systems worked properly through the movie. This competition made single-screen theatres upgrade, making theatre-going considerably more expensive and pushing this simple pleasure beyond the reach of large numbers in India.

Of course, the rise of cable TV helped. What the mass-market audience missed out in cinema halls, they were able to watch on TV screens. With tickets becoming expensive, the audience that was able to go to cinema halls mostly comprised better-off urban sections of society.

This led the Hindi film industry to offer content in line with these sensibilities, implying that the out-and-out maar dhaad masala movie or a love story where the hero and heroine fight everyone to get married in the end—and other such basic plots—went out of the equation. This gap was first filled by Bhojpuri cinema, which catered to large audiences in the Hindi heartland. But Bhojpuri cinema had poor production values.

Further, the dialect is largely spoken in eastern Uttar Pradesh and western Bihar, and thus it couldn’t appeal to the broader Hindi heartland. This is where South Indian movies came in. Many movies originally made in Tamil and Telugu were dubbed in Hindi and released on TV channels, where they found a huge audience.