For the past month or so, there has been a nasty battle going on between the producers and theatre owners. The producers want small and medium budget films to have a direct OTT release during this lockdown period to recover their investments whereas the theatre owners are finding this trend hard to digest. Earlier in the day, Amitabh Bachchan and Ayushmann Khurrana's upcoming film Gulabo Sitabo was announced to have a direct OTT premiere on June 12th. This news as expected did not go well with the theatre associations. The first theatre group to raise their voice is INOX. Here is their official statement against the producer’s decision.
“STATEMENT BY INOX ON A PRODUCTION HOUSE'S ANNOUNCEMENT TO RELEASE THEIR MOVIE ON AN OTT PLATFORM BY SKIPPING THE THEATRICAL RUN
14th May, 2020. INOX would like to express extreme displeasure and disappointment on an announcement made by a production house today, to release the, movie directly on an OTT platform by skipping the theatrical window run. The decision of the production house to deviate from the globally prevalent content windowing practice is alarming and disconcerting.
Cinemas and content creators have always been into mutually beneficial partnerships, where one's action provided fillip to anothers revenues. INOX has been investing profoundly towards adding world class quality screens, across the country, only to provide more eyeballs to the great content being produced. This partnership has endured for decades, and has provided succour to each other. In these troubled tirnes, it is disturbing to see one of the partners not interested in continuing the mutually beneficial relationship, especially when the need of the hour is to stand shoulder to shoulder with each other, and bring the film industry back to its vibrant best.
Such acts, though isolated, vitiate the atmosphere of mutual partnership and paint these content producers as fair-weather friends rather than all-weather life-long partners. Needless to say, INOX will be constrained to examine its options, and reserves all rights, including taking retributive measures, in dealing with such fair-weather friends.
INOX would the to reiterate that as the backbone of the cinematic value chain, this windowing pattern has done wonders in terms of revenues for the content creators and all other stakeholders, as it offers them the opportunity to extract the best from all available mediurns, which include cinemas, OTT platforms as well as satellite.
INOX would like to urge all content creators not to skip the theatrical run, and stay with the age old and established windowing pattem, which is in the best interests of all stakeholders in the value chain.”
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