Raj B Shetty: Not every film that is made today is meant for a theatrical viewing

Over the last several years, one of the biggest grouses that Kannada filmmakers had was that audiences were not making a beeline for theatres, with the latter claiming that the lack of good content was to blame. In response, several in the Kannada film industry have been making efforts to rectify this, attempting different kind of story-telling, experimental cinema, among others. Some have caught the fancy of filmgoers, others have not and there is still no hard and fast rule to follow for filmmakers to ensure that audiences will throng theatres. The pandemic and the surge of OTT platforms, offering content from across the world, has not helped the cause of filmmakers either, with a large chunk of audiences today preferring to wait and watch films on streamers rather than taking the effort to head out to movie halls. The result is that several movie halls, especially single-screen theatres, are being shut down and replaced with convention halls, shopping malls, etc.

Addressing this during a recent promotional interview, Kannada filmmaker Raj B Shetty said that the issue is that as an industry, Sandalwood has not been able to give audiences good films consistently. Marketing a film and being able to sell it is just as important as making a good film, he reckons, adding that in today’s day and age, it would not be right to expect that every movie is worth a theatrical outing. “There are some films that are best experienced on OTT, like, for instance, the smaller, content-oriented ones and there are others that have to be seen in theatres. We have to understand that the nature of content consumption has changed; our audience has not. If I look at my own films, Ondu Motteya Kathe and Garuda Gamana Vrishaba Vahana brought people to theatres and made money. Swathi Mutthina Male Haniye was made with an OTT outing in mind. If I then try to take it to theatres and no one turns up, I can’t blame audiences,” he said in an interview with Vijayavani.

The other problem, he says is that teams that make films on small-budgets often don’t realize that they need to have perhaps just as much money to spend on publicity as well, and even if they do, there is no guarantee that it will reach the target audience. The onus is on filmmakers to decide what kind of film they want to make in order to get it the desired audience.