I have got the formula…

Lately Indian movie producers believed in giving value for money to all its viewers. They found out a formula for films which is followed blindly over the years till now. The formula is “Masala film” (A mixture of many spices). A Masala Movie will have comedy, drama, romance, action, and a dozens of songs. A mixture of all the elements required to make a box-office-hit-movie. Unlike western movies, a masala movie cannot be easily classified under single genre. They believe if you mix all elements at right quantity. It’s not that India forgot its legacy of making thought-provoking films; just the numbers of such films were countable using fingers (might be of just one hand… ).

A typical story for a masala movie will have a handsome-young hero with muscles-and-dancing-abilities, young-beautiful heroin with perfect-figure-and-insufficient-cloths, dream sequence at foreign locations, cunning villain creating numerous hurdles for hero, songs after regular interval as short toilet breaks, a comic character which pops out time-to-time, an item-number from item-number-specialist [ ;)] , a deadly fight sequences with villain, ends of hero-heroin meeting each other and living happily thereafter.

Some tried to have uniqueness by trying permutation-combination of rich-guy-poor-gal, poor-guy-rich-gal. Some movies changed villain by parents, gangster, dacoit, politician, police, second-girl-in-love-tringle, second-guy-in-love-tringle.

A (mis-)management case : Is there really a formula?

Some years ago management guru (self-proclaimed!) Arindam Chaudhuri (IIPM fame) announced in the press that he has found a magic formula to succeed at the box office. And his new movie is going to be a smash-hit. Read the old news article here

http://www1.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/articleshow/890576.cms

Story after that: He released an extremely unbearable movie called Rok Sako To Rok Lo (RSTRL). The movie was a super-duper-flop everywhere. And with this so called scientific approach, exhaustive marketing research, focus groups analysis, failed along the movie miserably.

Very few films try break out from this year-old success (so called??) formula of masala movie to make different kind of movies. But a point to ponder is success ratio of these off-beat films is much higher than all the masala movies made ever.

Read next post for: Psyche behind Masala Movies.