Lights, Camera....drama

Every other week, a Tamil lm fails to make it to screens on time. The most recent being Kalavani 2, which ran into a financial dispute. Before it, Vijay Sethupathi’s latest, Sindhubaadh, was mired in a similar financial quagmire, delaying the lm’s release. A 1,000­ crore industry facing such a crisis does not augur well for aspiring lm­makers and the audience. While there is a perception that the Goods and Services Tax and lack of recognition of the film industry by formal financial organisations are behind the crisis, industry insiders suggest that the problems are more fundamental — to do with financial indiscipline, opaque transactions and box-office reports, irrational star salaries and a failure to keep a leash on projects. The major stakeholders of the industry — financiers, stars and technicians, producers, distributors and theatre owners — are at loggerheads, creating a circle of distrust. The result is that films, already fraught with uncertainty, are hit hard.

With the film industry going through a protracted rough patch, the actors, film­mak­ ers and producers are locked in a sort of a blame game.

Producers claim the salar­ ies paid to actors and techni­ cians are ‘too high and irra­ tional’ and that they are often taken unawares by the ballooning budgets, delayed production schedules and lack of nancial discipline.

While producers and actors / techni­cians, who take home a substantial package, are at log­ gerheads with each other, everybody realises the need to make the industry more producer ­friendly.

Up and coming star Vishnu Vishal, who delivered a ma­ jor hit, Ratsasan, in 2018 and a few oth­er critically acclaimed box oce successes, says that the industry is facing a crisis on account of the exponential increase in the number of re­ leases, costlier tickets after implementation of GST, hyp­er­critical audiences in the age of social media, and an unorganised film trade.

Problem of plenty