Blog: Why do movies from Yash Raj Films do well at the box office? 
By IndiaFM News Bureau, December 30, 2006 - 04:15 IST
How do most Yash Raj Films movies manage to succeed at the box office? Is it because they are great scripts? Or is it because
Yash Raj Films spend a fortune on marketing their movies?
They sure know how to smartly package a movie. The result? An otherwise average movie opens to great weekend collections all
over the world thanks to the initial hype created by the excellent promotions. In fact around 40 to 50% of the total budget of the
movie is actually spent on promoting the movie.
This is a very good tactic because it ensures that the producer (or Distributors as the case may be) recovers his or her investment
by the time the talk spreads about how good or bad the movie is.
These movies depend solely on the first weekend collections. In nine of ten cases, the opening weekend tickets are sold out well in
advance. This is because by the time the movie hits the marquee every Tom Dick and Harry in any corner of the country know even
the minutest details about the movie.
Switch on the TV and you see an interview with the lead actor in one channel, a Page 3 report on something related to the movie in
the next channel and a staple diet of the movie’s songs in the third. Enough about the idiot box. Grab your newspaper – You see
reports after reports on how this movie is made.
Interestingly, there is this “Est” factor. People talk about their movie and use words ending with “Est” liberally. (Best movie,
Scariest time of my life, Funniest experiences…) This superlative “performance” of the media partners works big time for the movie.
Recently while watching a Hindi movie, I was amazed to see the number of media partners the movie had. The titles flashed at least
twenty partners!
Compare this with the Telugu movie industry. Most of the movies in Telugu suffer from inefficient publicity. The professional
approach Hindi movies adopt is missing in Telugu. While some movies are bogged down by over publicity, others have practically
zero publicity.
When I mentioned this to a friend, he opined that perhaps the Telugu movie makers were scared of creating a hype – which might
work against the movie.
What differentiates Hype from Publicity? You can’t hype a movie but you can publicize it. Smart packaging of the movie’s
prerelease media exposure is called “Publicity” while elevating the movie to the zenith purely based on the actors/technicians
involved amounts to creating Hype.
The differentiation aforesaid is off my hat. I am sure the line dividing these two is very thin and quite fuzzy. Clear definition of Hype
and Publicity maybe not possible. However we can very well tilt the equation heavily towards smart publicity – by taking a leaf or
two from the marketing cookbooks used in Bollywood… especially by Yash Raj Films.
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