By Anant Mathur (May 21, 2007)
Is it just me or do you also get pissed off when you see hindi film trailers? I mean what is it with just showing songs? A trailer's purpose is to sell the film. But the way hindi films are being promoted they sell the songs and not the film. When you look at trailers in Hollywood and other countries around the world, they may not reveal the story but they are interesting. A few good ones that come to mind are Spiderman Trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Fantastic Four, Shrek, . They didn't necessarily reveal the story but they made you want to go and see the film and that's the point really. Isn't it?
I think the problem with hindi films bombing at the box office is that they don't promote them well enough. A two minute trailer featuring on Music channels with a hot item number isn't going to get people to come see your film, it will sell music albums, but it won't bring people to the cinema halls. A trailer needs to be interesting enough to make me wanna go hmmm...It's Friday afternoon and oh yeah...I remember this really cool trailer I saw last night and wanted to see this movie lets see what my friends are doing tonight. Trailers have the power to make me call up my friends or family to see if they want to have an evening out at a multiplex.
In Hollywood, if a film costs 100 million dollars to make, they spend 20-30 million on promotion, a prime example of this is the recently released James Bond Casino Royale. Casino Royale cost 102 million dollars to produce and had a Ad budget of close to 44 million dollars. The end result is that it made over 167 million dollars in the U.S. alone, recovering it cost and making a little bit of profit, internationally it made over 462 million dollars, that's a total of close to 600 million dollars. That's more than 4 times what was spent on production and marketing. And this is before the DVD release. If so much money is put into a film it only makes sense to market it well.
I think Indian filmmakers need to do a makeover on the way films are marketed. A lot of good films suffer because their music just isn't interesting and because we are only shown the songs in the trailer we don't go to see it. If filmmakers really want to copy something from the West, copy their style of marketing and promotion, not their screenplays. In the end, a film which is market well will provide greater profit than a film which is not. No matter how good or bad the story is marketing is key to the success of films. That's why a lot of bad films make money in Hollywood. It's all about getting audiences into cinema halls. A place where Indian filmmakers seem to be (pardon the pun) trailing far behind...
Is it just me or do you also get pissed off when you see hindi film trailers? I mean what is it with just showing songs? A trailer's purpose is to sell the film. But the way hindi films are being promoted they sell the songs and not the film. When you look at trailers in Hollywood and other countries around the world, they may not reveal the story but they are interesting. A few good ones that come to mind are Spiderman Trilogy, Lord of the Rings, Titanic, Fantastic Four, Shrek, . They didn't necessarily reveal the story but they made you want to go and see the film and that's the point really. Isn't it?
I think the problem with hindi films bombing at the box office is that they don't promote them well enough. A two minute trailer featuring on Music channels with a hot item number isn't going to get people to come see your film, it will sell music albums, but it won't bring people to the cinema halls. A trailer needs to be interesting enough to make me wanna go hmmm...It's Friday afternoon and oh yeah...I remember this really cool trailer I saw last night and wanted to see this movie lets see what my friends are doing tonight. Trailers have the power to make me call up my friends or family to see if they want to have an evening out at a multiplex.
In Hollywood, if a film costs 100 million dollars to make, they spend 20-30 million on promotion, a prime example of this is the recently released James Bond Casino Royale. Casino Royale cost 102 million dollars to produce and had a Ad budget of close to 44 million dollars. The end result is that it made over 167 million dollars in the U.S. alone, recovering it cost and making a little bit of profit, internationally it made over 462 million dollars, that's a total of close to 600 million dollars. That's more than 4 times what was spent on production and marketing. And this is before the DVD release. If so much money is put into a film it only makes sense to market it well.
I think Indian filmmakers need to do a makeover on the way films are marketed. A lot of good films suffer because their music just isn't interesting and because we are only shown the songs in the trailer we don't go to see it. If filmmakers really want to copy something from the West, copy their style of marketing and promotion, not their screenplays. In the end, a film which is market well will provide greater profit than a film which is not. No matter how good or bad the story is marketing is key to the success of films. That's why a lot of bad films make money in Hollywood. It's all about getting audiences into cinema halls. A place where Indian filmmakers seem to be (pardon the pun) trailing far behind...
© Anant Mathur. All Rights Reserved.
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