Recession hits Bollywood

- Planet Bollywood Special Correspondant           Let us know what you think about this story

Mumbai, Dec 15 (PTI) Recession and tight liquidity has forced Bollywood to go in for cost cutting and slowdown on several projects. Filmmaker Mukesh Bhatt feels that distributors have been severely hit by the recession.

"It is difficult to find buyers and committed cost cannot be honoured. Ninety per cent of the films have been put on hold while those on floors have been held up due to the slowdown," he said.

"Production, acquisition and actor salary costs had illogically shot through the roof with no commensurate returns for distributors sitting at the end of the value chain," said Tanuj Garg, Head UK & Europe (International Marketing, Distribution & Syndication) at Studio 18.

Besides, banks have also become cautious about lending as film budgets had sky rocketed in the last few months, trade sources said.

Blaming the corporates for the situation, Bhatt said, "they are responsible for the ridiculous price-hikes and genuine producers have been affected." "Cost-control is required and artificial price-hike needed to be revised," he said.

Bhatt also endorses the view. He feels that corporates who have entered the motion picture business have little knowledge of film industry functioning.

"Artistes are paid astronomical amount of money and the corporates do not get much return," he said.

The slowdown has also taken its toll on the marketing budget of movies. Due to drastically pruned budgets, promotion of big-budgeted movies like 'Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi', 'Ghajini' and 'Chandni Chowk To China' have been extremely low key, sources said.

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