The release of Zara Bachke Zara Hatke last week came with a buy one ticket get one offer through the biggest ticketing platform in India, Book My Show. The industry reports of the film were not encouraging but the film worked with a certain audience in the Hindi belt heartland and this middle class has an overlapping audience in the metros as well so many theatres did well in the metros as well. 

As within the industry the film was not thought to be that good the success of the film was put down to the offer and then there was complete chaos as midweek you had the other holdovers like The Kerala Story and even Spiderman giving offers with free tickets and discounted rates. The re release of Gadar Ek Prem Katha on limited screenings is coming with a buy one get one free offer. There are now many producers of new films contemplating the same.

The fact is that these things just dont work and its about the film and Zara Hatke Zara Bachke has worked to whatever extent due to the film and not the offer. There were reports about X amount of lakh tickets going for free but that is not the case as the numbers coming the multiplexes chains are much much less as far as far as the free tickets go.

The buy one get one free ticket tactic means that your share is zero on two tickets which makes little business sense. In fact it is less than zero as you are also paying GST yourself on one of the tickets meaning share being minus. The problem being faced by the industry is basically a change in audiences tastes and it is a game of catch up.

This has happened before but this time due to the break for the pandemic it has happened very quickly rather over a few years. Normally you have releases so the change is picked up and adjustments made to the fresh content going on the floors but this time it was standstill and then the old content releasing to a divergent audience and box office which had changed. The former in terms of tastes and the latter in terms of different areas driving the box office. 

The industry must get into its head that cheap tickets and free tickets does NOT result in more business. The former may give you more footfalls but not higher collections.  There is also a misconception that multiplexes want higher rates which is not true as they are happy to drop rates and do these incentives if the producer wishes and its much harder actually for the producer to get the extra push from multiplexes when the there is a premium product. Yes cinema in a multiplex is not affordable for many but the issue there is not the ticket rate but concessions. There are many multiplexes with 150-200 rates but where the bill goes up and up is on concessions.

Simply put offers and low ticket rates are not going make films do better business. The business side is content related and if the audience does not like there is not much chance of getting numbers. You can even go dirt cheap and all that will do is get more admits but the bottom line is that its unlikley to increase. There are so many examples of this in the tax exemption days as tickets rates went down 70-80% due to high tax but even still with tax exemption so many films flopped and could not do the business.

This is a dangerous cycle and once you start it sometimes gets hard to stop as by then you make cheap or free tickets a habit for some of the audience and even multiplex chains can like it as they see higher footfalls which leads to higher sames on concessions side and the only loser will be the distributor or producer. 

It looked like this was all gone post cinema day when many tactics and tricks were tried but it has come back now and even here the industry will find out it does not work as films tank with offers and cheap tickets when content is not good. Cinema day is fine once or twice a year but it can only work if its a novelty rather than week in and week out and even there it cant be when there is a highly awaited big release as you cant build capacity.. 

The sooner the industry does away with this the better and just let the sytem work naturally. The rule has been the same for years and holds true today that its all about the product being good and that good product with a good distribution may get out a 5-10% better result than the same product with normal or poor distribution.