Aniruddha Roy Chowdhary’s Pink is going strong at the box-office. Rewind to a month back and you may not have even heard of this film starring Amitabh Bachchan.
Today, four days after its release - the film has caught the imagination of the urban movie-going audience, the critics love it and it’s got the cash registers ringing across all theatres. It’s everything that any movie studio would want to have in a film released from its stable.
Yet, several big studios declined to produce Pink when it was pitched to them.
The film opened tepidly on Friday and by Sunday it saw a huge jump in collections thank to excellent reviews and good word of mouth:
- Friday - Rs 4.32 cr
- Saturday - Rs 7.65 cr
- Sunday - Rs 9.54 cr
- Total: Rs 20.70 cr
Add to this satellite rights and overseas collections. For a film with a reported budget of around Rs 14 crore, Pink will emerge as a hit.
So why wasn’t Pink backed by any of the big studios in Bollywood? Had Shoojit Sircar not approached them? Well, he had BUT the they found the film to be “unviable”.
In an interview to Rajeev Masand, Pink’s producer Shoojit Sircar reveals that he was very angry when the film was rejected by the few studios that they had initially approached, but had full faith in the film and decided to make it himself.
The creative producer of Pink says:
Initially, with the kind of subject, we went to a couple of studios and they couldn’t find the viability of the subject with the kind of star cast we were talking about. That’s when he (Shoojit) said he wants to make the film and we said let’s do it. We had the conviction on the story.Ronnie Lahiri, Creative Producer, Pink
I was angry. I will not let 20 people sitting in a studio decide what is my film. It’s my vision. How do you know about my vision?Shoojit Sircar, Filmmaker/Producer, Pink
The film’s writer Ritesh Shah recalls going in for narrations with studio executives and management trainees and receiving pages of feedback on what they found acceptable and unacceptable in the script. Shah also knows that Shoojit was deeply hurt by the attitude that a few studios showed towards Pink, the filmmaker felt his integrity as a creator was being questioned even after films like Vicky Donor, Madras Cafe and Piku.
Shoojit says he tried his best to convince the studios he pitched Pink to, “I said, I am standing by. Don’t worry, even if it’s a new director, I am guaranteeing you, I am standing by. And I stood by this film. But I was really angry with the studio and that’s when I said koi bhi studio ke paas nahin jayenge, khud karenge chahe kuch bhi ho jaye. I wasn’t challenging them, I was challenging myself. I was really pissed off.”
So how exactly does a studio figure out a film’s viability? It calculates the estimated revenue that can be generated by a ‘project’ depending on the saleability of the stars featuring in it and deducing whether the money invested in said project justifies the star and subject.
The story or script of a film rarely adds weight on its own. And unfortunately, passion, integrity and the zest to make a good film does not come with calculable markers.
It all boils down to the same question - can a potential film’s merits and demerits be calculated on an Excel worksheet and should that then be the only governing factor in green-lighting a film? If the response to Pink is anything to go by, then the answer is a resounding “No!”.