Understanding Bollywood.....

There is a lot of confusion going around among the movie lovers that why is there so much difference between the producers number's and the distributors numbers? What role does screen count play in collection of movie? What do you mean by Distributors share? How do producers recover the amounts invested by them? . All these are common questions in the minds of genuine movie lovers since past few weeks. I over here will try to answer all your questions.

Let us all start from few basic terms-

1- Producer

A producer is a person who takes the risk of making the movie. He is someone who would put his own money in the product . The main aim of a producer is to make profit.

2-Distributor

A distributor is a person who purchases rights to show the movie in a particular territory at a particular price. A distributor purchases the rights to show the movie in his territory from the producer.

3-Exhibitor

A exhibitor is basically the theater owner. There are 2 types of theater in India- Single screens and Multiplex. The exhibitor is being paid by distributor to run his movie in the theater. (We shall explain the entire process further)

4- Gross Collection

Gross collection is total collection of movie without deducting the TAX.

5-Net Collection

Net collection is total collection of movie after deducting the TAX. 

These are the 3 basic terms used in bollywood whose meaning isn't known to many. The cycle of forecasting a movie is very complicated. Here I shall try to explain you that.  A producer shall invite all distributors to purchase the movie. The distributors bid for the movie and the one who has the maximum bid gets the movie. 

Eg- Theres a leading distributor of Mumbai Territory. So if he wants to purchase a particular movie he shall pay producer a certain amount and buy that movie and only he would have the right to show that movie in that territory. 

The distributor after purchasing the movie shall begin to book theaters to play the movie. While booking theaters there are various terms and conditions which are to be worked on. A single screen theater usually get a fixed amount of rent for playing the movie for X number of days and along with the rent it takes service charge. Barring this the entire amount goes to the distributor. There is vast amount of profit for distributors from single screens and they get a lot of return. In a multiplex distributors share is always diminishing. The distributor share is high in the 1st week but it goes on decreasing in the upcoming weeks.

Eg- In 1st week the amount distributor shall get would be 50% of total NET collection. While 2nd week may be reduced to 30% of total NET collection while the rest would be kept by the multiplex owners.

So distributor share is the amount the distributor receives from the theaters. It is the distributor share which matters the most as the distributor purchases the right of the movie from producers and it is important for them to recover the amount. In Bollywood movies are judged by total NET collections but barring Bollywood , all other movie industries judge the success of the movie taking into consideration distributors share. Even Tollywood and Punjabi movies are being judged on Distributors share.

In bollywood the movie having highest distributor share is EK THA TIGER with 113cr followed by 3 Idiots with 99cr. Despite Ek Tha Tiger earning less than 3 Idiots , It has a better distributor share mainly because of terms of distributors.

Once the movie is sold to the distributor the work of producers is more or less over except for reporting the figures.

This was the part one of my Exclusive article on explaining basics of bollywood. I shall be having more parts of the same coming soon which shall clear all your doubts. Hope you all liked this article. You can ask your queries in the comment section below. Hope you liked the article and my effort to make you understand the terms.

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