Renowned actor Manoj Bajpayee is currently basking in the amazing responses his latest film Joram has been receiving. However, the Devashish Makhija directorial has been facing challenges in gaining visibility at the box office, owing to the Animal tsunami. Joram hit the theatres a week after Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Ranbir Kapoor-starrer Animal and Meghna Gulzar’s Vicky Kaushal-starrer Sam Bahadur were released.
Opening up about the limited prospects of Joram at the box office amidst the competition with Animal, Bajpayee said during a recent chat with News18, “We knew that Animal and Sam Bahadur are two very big films. A lot of money was spent on both the films. There was and still a hype around Animal. But we couldn’t afford to spend that much money on our film because Joram was a different kind of a film and we could only allot a certain amount of money to promote and publicise it.”
“We didn’t want to over-burden our film. We were very practical and realistic about it. We knew that we couldn’t be idealistic about the situation and our film. And that’s why the pressure on us was less in terms of earning profits as quickly as possible,” he added.
Meanwhile, Bajpayee reiterated his disapproval of the excessive discussion on box office figures, stating that it has eroded the sanctity of cinema. “I’ve always spoken against the obsession with box office and have always believed that it has ruined the culture of filmmaking in our country. Numbers being thrown at people’s faces isn’t the right thing to do,” he added.
Highlighting the negative impact of audiences engaging in discussions about box office numbers, Bajpayee expressed that in conversations with people now, they tend to spontaneously mention the earnings of a film. He lamented, “They feel that if a film has collected Rs 100 crore or above, it’s a very good film and that it qualifies for all kinds of honours in this country.”
He further claimed that the need to create records has made filmmakers money-minded and pushed them to come up with tactics to divert attention away from the art of storytelling. “Now what happens is that when you are making a film, you are thinking about how to fool an audience to come to a theatre and come up with tricks to show that you’ve earned Rs 10 crore above its real collections on its first day. It’s like our key responsibility has changed completely.”
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