Effective marketing of indie movies

Abstract

The Indian movie industry is one of the most prolific in the world, leading global charts in terms of annual film output. In the year 2012, India produced more than 1.6 thousand films, the output being larger than that of China and Japan (ranked second and third, respectively) counted together. To compare, North America (the United States and Canada) produced only 476 movies in the same year. However, when it comes to quality of cinema, reflected in the form of global awards and recognition, India lags notoriously behind its counterparts. Though one can always argue that those awards are heavily skewed in the favour of the western world, we can’t turn a blind eye to the fact that the quality of movies being made has genuinely dropped over the years. A testimony of this fact is that the last time we bagged an Oscar for movie-making (music not included) was an Honorary Award to Satyajit Ray in 1992. To evaluate the possible reasons for this, we need to take a closer look into the psyche of movie-makers in the country. As the penetration of movies increased, so did their impact on the Indian society. This relationship became so intense that as time progressed, it was the audience who started dictating the kind of movies they wanted rather than the other way round. And when this happened, directors were forced to pander to the masses so that the producers’ profits remain green. Once this conflict between good scripts and hit scripts started, movies started losing their differentiation. A set “formula” started emerging for creating a blockbuster, the key ingredients of which were A-league actors, item songs, fight sequences and heavy promotion, among others. Thus, the movie industry entered a vicious circle where only mass entertainers ruled box-office collections, tempting more and more film-makers to join the bandwagon.