Warning: This is not a Chuck Norris imitation cheap joke. What is common to Superstar Rajinikanth, Audi, Honda, Nissan and Maruti Suzuki? All of them are super brands but all of them have faced demands for either auto recall or refund of money from distributors for faulty manufacturing! Jokes apart, Rajinikanth is having to eat humble pie too often nowadays because of a not-so-best-practice that he himself started a few years ago when the much-touted blockbuster Baba bombed at the box office. Suresh Krishna, the films director, has even written a book making a passing reference to it. Rajinikanth fans have made this whole habit of refunding monies to the distributors when the film flops as a measure of a man with a munificence larger than Amnesty International or the Nobel Prize Foundation. But why should stars return monies? Is that good? Is that sustainable? I always thought this is a move which backfires. Why? Films are pure commercial business and calls are taken without expectation of protection from legal sections. There are no equivalents of The Customer Protection Act, 1986 or The Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 or even the plain old Sale of Goods Act to offer largesse to beleagued distributors battling a dud story and a deadpan box-office performance. Have you ever seen Shah Rukh Khan or Salman Khan or even Aamir Khan offer such safety nets or buyback programs? The minimum guarantee of a blockbuster comes from a bankable hero whose charishma will work out the arithmetic to break-even levels and beyond at the box office to ring-fence the distributors. Doing this kind of charity is insulting to the whole business of commercialism in creative fields. If Rajinikanth is not to be faulted for a series of drab shows, then the team firing the salvos at the promos have to take it down. Who asked you to hype the length of Rajinis role in Kuselan? Who asked you to make a below-par animation film with a bootstrapping budget called Kochadiyon and blitz it up like a nonpareil in animatronics? Who asked you to over-hype a film inversely proportional to its content? Have you seen any stars in India do it on a sustainable basis or even do it once? Like Chiranjeevi. Or Amitabh Bachchan. Both BigB and Chiru have given more quality in their films over their careers than Mr Rajini. Distribution has always been a wild goose chase for a lottery tickety that may either get you single digit pennies or disproportionate gains. Best to keep it that way, Superstar. Or, change your way by making films with better content and consistency of entertainment. This is not a highway to show just one way of your megalomania with no intrinsic value.
Posted on: Mon, 22 Dec 2014 13:35:48 +0000
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