Top 10 Emerging Trends in 2016 and Impact on Tamil Film Makers
2015 gave a glimpse of some key trends that are beginning to shape the future of Tamil cinema. Read some cyclical and structural trends that film-makers can decide to ignore at their own peril.
1. Shrinking production budget due to sharp decline in satellite rights
TV satellite rights used to be one of the major revenue sources for producers, contributing close to Rs.10 to 15 Crores for medium to big budget movies. With the current generation of viewers increasingly spending more time online and smart phones for consuming video contents, the cable TVs are feeling the heat with drop in advertisement revenue. This has in turn resulted in many of the movie rights going unsold; rest of the lucky ones have seen a drop of roughly 50% revenue drop with respect to what it used to be during hey days.
2. Many big producers go bankrupt
Tamil Cinema used to have a good number of producers who could self-fund their movies without having to borrow from a third party financier. During the last few years, many notable producers have gone bankrupt and others have stepped aside from production due to notable failures. For e.g., Producers of two of the 2015's biggest budget movies "Ai" and "Puli" claimed bankruptcy and refused to pay final payments for all cast and crew members.
3. Leading financiers locks up their money for upcoming TN state elections
With producers' funds running dry, third party financiers are now in the driver's seat as they lend money contingent upon their casting decisions. Many of the leading financiers have diverted their money to fund election campaigns as they are considered more profitable than financing movies. Expect the first half of 2016 to have restrained outflow of cash from financiers pocket to movie production.
4. Big corporate producers are adopting a "wait and watch" approach
Due to extreme levels of unpredictability in Tamil industry, a number of corporate companies who had set foot in Tamil Industry, namely Reliance, Eros, UTV, Yash Raj, Fox Star Studios, Ayngaran, PVP and others, look disinterested and taking a wait and watch approach. A few of them are already in the process of exiting the Tamil market.
5. Leading actors will have to drop their salary (by at least 20% or more)
Leading actors are getting pressure from all directions to drop their exorbitant remunerations. Almost every one of the top 10 actors have dodged this in 2015 by acting for their own productions or for"benaami" producers. When the actors realize their true market value, they are expected to quietly drop their salaries in 2016.
6. Telugu heroes flood Tamil industry through bilingual movies
After phenomenal success of Baahubali, many of the Telugu heroes (especially the ones with good fluency in Tamil) are now keen on bilingual projects with leading directors. Some of the announced projects are Karthi and Nagarjun's bilingual, AR Murugadoss and Mahesh Babu's movie are a few of the many projects in the pipeline.
7. Spurt of sequels/franchise projects
With lack of funds, Tamil actors, directors and producers are looking at making sequels to extract residual value out of their prior super hits. The year 2016 will bring a lot of Sequel -- Enthiran-2, Darling-2, Aranmanai-2, Singam-3, Muni series, Ko-2 are a few of the long list of movies that are expected to release in 2016.
8. Decline of audio market and resistance to give away music rights
The audio rights are now being sold for small amount with official revenues from CDs, mp3s and album sales becoming round-off errors. Additionally, the big music labels demand complete rights of lyricist and music directors which makes production houses to keep the rights with them and tie-up with smaller labels which does only marketing for the album.
9. Decline of number of songs in a movie
Decline in song counts is the most remarkable trend emerging in 2015. The long established practice of having 5+ mandatory songs have been shattered to smithereens. This was made possible because of the imminent death of traditional form of audio consumption (cassettes, CDs). The film-makers are not under any compulsion to include 5 or 6 songs just to fill the CDs. Also, BGM tracks have now become as important as songs. To name a few, Papanasam, Demonte colony, Maya, 36 Vayadhinile, OK Kanmani, Thoongavanam have all had less than 3 songs.
10. Commercial movies tighten the scripts by removing speed-breakers (i.e., relief scenes)
Many of the commercial movies were infamous for having unnecessary songs, parallel comedy tracks and forced action sequences. Viewers with short attention span switch over to other mobile devices for Whatsapp, Twitter, Facebook, etc. The recent success of Thani Oruvan has given tremendous confidence to film-makers to keep the script taut without forcing relief scenes (songs and comedy scenes). Many of the directors have now gone back to their drawing boards to tighten the script and reduce the run time under the current average of 145 minutes.
Final Word : Many of these trends are expected to establish strong foothold in 2016 and stay with us. The good news is Tamil industry is trending in the positive direction with focus on content and emergence of small-budget directors ready to explore bold concepts. However, the gloom is cast due to economics of film production are reaching crisis levels with acute shortage of funds.