Cost Failure: Tollywood's Costliest Mistake

on Apr 19, 2016

"When you know that films are flopping big time due to excessive budgets involved, why are you buying these films?"— a Journalist asked distributor Sudhakar Reddy (Nitin's father) other day.

He replied, "Cost failures are cause for the plight of distributors. I agree, we're buying, but we are doing this because of a hope— a hope— that the director and hero will give a Baahubali kind of hit". He compared distribution business with that of a gambling.

Cut to the facts, films like Sardaar (Selling budget: 90 Cr), Aagadu (70 Cr) and Bruce Lee (65 Cr) are all flops, content wise. And their recovery date is nearing 40-55 crores. In that case, distributors has to lose almost 50% of their investment. Point is, are these films really worth a 90-70-65 crores investment? An unwanted set for Sardaar has cost nearly 10 crores. Aagadu is bloated with unwanted stuff and costs doubled. Bruce Lee's climax fight shot in Bangkok costed 4 crores but it's not even worthy. They should have spent that budget on Chiranjeevi's entry feat at least. These costliest mistakes of Telugu heroes, directors and producers, are forcing distributors to dole out huge sums. In turn, those huge sums are lying irrecoverable in the end.

Will Tollywood learn from the mistakes and try to make films at a lower cost? Even if films of Mahesh and Charan flop, they could amass 40 crores easily. So if producers sell the films in that bracket, then easily distributors could recover investments.