Actor Manoj Bajpayee recently expressed his displeasure at audiences for not turning up in large numbers to watch his 2023 film Joram in theatres. He said that while people spend thousands of rupees on mainstream entertainers, they don’t watch “real cinema”. This trend, he said in a new interview, is endangering the art form itself.
In an interview with Jist, while discussing Joram’s box office performance, he said while gesturing at the audience, “Inmein se kisi ne nahi dekhi hogi (no one here must have watched the film). I am telling you, yeh yetharth hai (it is a possibility). We had purposely released Joram in very few theatres because we wanted to gauge if the audiences’ brains work the same way as we think, or if they only want to watch other kind of films. People who went to watch the film really liked it, they themselves are promoting it by word or mouth, telling ten other people to watch it. But the majority of the people don’t believe in such films, and even if they do, they want to watch them for free. The same people will take a loan to watch other kinds of films, they are okay doing that, it’s their taste. Our fight is about this. We want to see how interested they are in watching the kind of films we want to make.”
Manoj also discussed how he thrives on films that make people think, because his brand of cinema doesn’t entirely depend on entertainment value. He said, “There are two kinds of cinema. One is where it is a medium for art, and the other kind of cinema only entertains you — you pay for the tickets, you dance and sing songs, watch action, and it’s over. You go home and forget about it, wait for next Friday. But I look at cinema as an art medium, where we want to use it to tell our stories in the best possible way so that the people who watch the film like it and the stories we tell remain in their mind for a few days. That is cinema for me. For the majority the audience, cinema is only a medium of entertainment. They just want to whistle in theatre halls, or hoot when they see a fight sequence. Now people are also bursting crackers in cinema halls.”
“However, people like me have never been scared of this till date. Some people watch some films, and not watch other films at all or go less. We aren’t scared because I am convinced that what I am doing is the right cinema and it is doing justice. If we don’t make this kind of cinema then it won’t last for too long. Cinema can’t last with films that are meant only for entertainment,” he added.
Addressing the trend where most content-driven, small scale films are released directly on streaming platforms, he said debuting Joram in theatres was a calculated risk. “All films will end up on OTT eventually. We did an experiment, even when we knew what the results would be. We wanted to release Joram in theatres and observe, do it in lesser number of screens and see if audiences will step out of their houses to watch the film or not. Tickets for the film were cheap, but people didn’t go. We had released Joram in 350 screens, if people would have gone to watch the film, at a full capacity in these 350 screens, then we would have earned Rs 60 lakh. We weren’t even looking at earning in crores, we wanted to take a risk. Per day the film earned around 15-19 lakh, which is very good compared to the big films which have 5000-6000 screens. If you look at the ratio, Joram is quite a successful film.”
Joram is a thriller written and directed by Devashish Makhija and produced by Zee Studios with Makhijafilm. It stars Manoj Bajpayee, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub, Tannishtha Chatterjee, and Smita Tambe. The film released in cinemas on December 3, 2023, after playing at several film festival around the world.
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