‘Stars buy their own tickets worth Rs 18 cr on opening weekend’: ‘Block booking’ hits Tamil film industry

‘Big stars buy tickets worth Rs 18 crore’

Producer Dhananjayan, who has recently been vocal about the challenges faced by producers in the Tamil film industry, has now spoken about how box office figures are often far from organic. Speaking to Cinema Strategist, he said: “What is happening lately in Hindi cinema to increase box office revenue is corporate booking, bulk booking and fake booking. You can book tickets online now; you don’t even have to do it in person. You can book 500 tickets at once. The sad part is that this has now entered the Tamil film industry too. Today, filmmakers book everything on the first day itself. Because of these fake bookings, films start trending on BookMyShow. If you book around 4,000 tickets for a show, it starts trending on the app. That creates an image.”

He further explained: “Big stars now buy tickets worth nearly Rs 10 crore on the first day. Out of that, they recover at least 40%, so the effective promotional expense comes down to around Rs 6 crore. That doesn’t bother them. If they spend about Rs 18 crore over the first three days, it still doesn’t matter because the box office numbers cross the Rs 10-crore mark, pushing the opening weekend collection beyond Rs 30 crore. So even if a film genuinely earns only around Rs 70 crore, the additional Rs 30 crore worth of bookings made by the actor pushes it into the Rs 100-crore club.”

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‘Resorting to fake booking to cross Rs 100 crore’

Explaining the motive behind such practices, Dhananjayan added: “All this is done to create an image. To show that their film earned Rs 100 crore, they resort to fake bookings. Actors, directors and producers come together for corporate booking, bulk booking and fake booking to create an exaggerated perception. They misuse this image to attract audiences through artificially generated demand.”

According to him, the trend is now severely affecting small-budget films as well. “Because of this trend, small films are suffering. Theatre owners have started imposing conditions on small producers, asking them to buy tickets for their own films for at least three days if they want a show. Multiplexes also say, ‘Sir, we will give you two shows, but only if you buy a total of 100 tickets per day for both shows.’ They don’t care whether people actually watch the film — they just want the tickets sold. Otherwise, there’s no show.”

Block bookings in Bollywood

The issue of block booking became a major talking point when film trade analyst Komal Nahta openly accused Maddock Films of inflating box office figures. In one of his YouTube videos, Komal claimed that producer Dinesh Vijan pioneered the trend of large-scale block booking.

“When Dinesh Vijan started this trend of block booking on such a massive scale by spending crores, I had written in my articles at the time that he was doing a great disservice to the industry without even realizing it. The direct consequence of that is that newspapers are now questioning even genuine hits.”

Speaking further on Faridoon Shahryar’s podcast, he elaborated: “Newspapers now feel that no film can truly be a hit anymore. If every film is doing well, then something must be wrong. Because Dinesh Vijan, you’ve conditioned people to believe that there’s no such thing as a genuine hit anymore. Even your own film, Chhaava, which is a genuine blockbuster, is now being questioned — people ask whether it’s really such a big hit. In the process, you’ve done a disservice even to your own film.”

Previously, SCREEN reported that block bookings, also known as corporate bookings, were done by makers or actors so they could ensure a minimum opening, and create an impression that a film was a bigger hit than it actually was. It was then said that such bookings helped with OTT deals as well.