The COVID-19 epidemic wreaked havoc on many industries, including the Indian film industry. It’s been a hard road for movie theatres, with them being the first to close and the last to open whenever there’s a major surge in COVID-19 cases.
With changing technologies and audience preferences, particularly the expansion of OTT platforms and interest in films from all regions and languages, particularly from the South, the Hindi film industry has struggled to recover since theatres reopened in mid-October 2021. (Barring a handful of states like Maharashtra which were initially at 50 per cent occupancy). With a lot of films, particularly those starring big-name actors, performing poorly at the box office, there are concerns about the Hindi film industry’s future prospects.
Around 1,000 to 1,500 movie screens are expected to close in 2020, according to FICCI-EY research titled “Playing by New Rules: India’s Media and Entertainment Sector Reboots in 2020.” Due to the closure of theatres during COVID-19, only 441 films were released in 2020, compared to 1,833 in 2019. At the same time, the way people watch movies on OTT platforms has grown dramatically.
Sooryavanshi, which was supposed to be released in March 2020 but was delayed till Diwali 2021, grossed approximately 200 crores domestically. Even if we exclude the Omicron wave, Bollywood films have struggled to find huge box office success, with even megastars like Akshay Kumar and Ajay Devgn having relatively low box office revenues in comparison to their pre-pandemic performances.
The epidemic struck at an inopportune time for the Hindi film industry, which had a pretty successful 2019 in terms of box office receipts and kicked out 2020 with a blockbuster in Tanhaji. Though a constant stream of big-ticket movies returned in 2021, there is a noticeable difference between how things were before the closure of theatres in March 2020 and how things are now.
