Audience give a lukewarm send off to Bollywood 2010

  • IndiaGlitz, [Tuesday,January 04 2011]

Week gone by was the dullest ever in Bollywood with audience largely staying away from theaters. In the last few years, there have been '3 Idiots' (2009), 'Ghajini' (2008), 'Welcome'/'Taare Zameen Par' (2007) that have made Christmas followed by New Year extremely special due to their blockbuster success. However, nothing of that sorts happened in 2010 end.

Meanwhile as a ritual, there were a couple of small time/backlog/stuck in the cans/inconsequential films that did arrive on the last Friday of the year - 'Bhoot And Friends' and 'Ada... a way of life'. Arriving with zero promotion and not quite boasting of any star value, both the films couldn't even find a decent all-India release for themselves. Worse, the critics too didn't bother to check out what these films had to offer, hence resulting in zero awareness about what the eventual product looked like.

As a result, both the films opened to practically zero occupancy, hence struggling to survive an entire week at those select number of theaters where they had arrived. Jackie Shroff starrer 'Bhoot And Friends' could still take some solace from the fact that since it is a kiddie flick, it has chances of finding audience on satellite as well as home video medium. Also, it wasn't particularly a bad film and was a poor show theatrically mainly due to nil promotion and bad release timing.

'Tere Kya Hoga Johny' was also supposed to release in the same weekend but was withdrawn at the last minute. The film currently finds itself in a limbo with even the makers postponing the film 'indefinitely' while citing 'unfavourable market condition' as the reason behind that. As per trade insiders though, the root cause of all the trouble is some financial settlement which the producers are currently fighting around. With this Neil Nitin Mukesh and Soha Ali Khan starrer not quite having any immediate plans for release, seems like this one too would now arrive straight on DVD.