Marathi cinema and the theory of everything, except viewers

Baapya, Picture Boyz, Ladki Bahin and Mission.Come Friday and the Marathi movie audience will be spoiled for choice with not one, but four releases on a single weekend! Except, Friday the 15th might just turn into another Friday the 13th for Marathi cinema with the horror of no screens for makers, and no idea of some of these films for viewers.It’s not new. There have been many weekends where the story is the same. Yours truly has watched and reviewed five films on one of these weekend ka vaars, some of them in the company of couples who, let’s just say, had a movie of their own parallelly running. There have been films with shows cancelled because I was the only one who had a ticket, and running a show for just one person is not cost-effective. Fair point. But also an issue whose solution is long overdue - with better content and better marketing strategies.

Instead, the industry is still fighting for screens. There are only a handful of repeat and bankable producers, and 80% of films follow a pattern - love stories or historical dramas. The handful of films that actually give you something worth watching fail to crack the footfall and numbers game which, however debatable, is how the business runs.Yes, Bollywood is a juggernaut compared to Marathi industry and the rise of south Indian films drove the dagger deeper into an industry that was already bleeding.

You can argue all you want that the post-COVID landscape is all about Indian cinema and there is no regional bifurcation anymore. But the budgets, reach and returns point to a masked reality, one where statements made just for optics and the on-ground situation are poles apart.The Malayalam industry cracked the equation. It already had good content, and it used the OTT boom to establish itself nationally. Today, a cinemagoer sitting in Delhi knows who Dulquer Salmaan or Fahadh Faasil is. Clearly there isn’t a lack of talent, but would the same stand true for Marathi cinema?The questions are simple:

There isn’t a standalone solution to this. Perhaps dedicated budgets and marketing teams would work. Perhaps pushing the envelope with stories can click with viewers. Or perhaps a revival of the many iconic but defunct single-screen theatres in the state for Marathi films would present a win-win situation. It could be either or all of these, but it’s high time the industry unites for a common goal - that of making good films that bring in the audiences.– This partly cynical piece comes from Mihir Bhanage, who wishes to actually witness the proverbial Golden Age of Marathi cinema soon