Ending my several week streak of seeing the new movie every Friday, I DID NOT see Jai Gangaajal last night.  But it’s still worth talking about, because of the reasons I didn’t/was not able to see it.  And why maybe those reasons are affecting the box office in general.

The main reason I didn’t see it, is that it wasn’t playing at my regular theater.  It was playing at a theater in the far West suburbs, and downtown, but not at either of the North suburban theaters near me, including the all-Indian one.  This is very unusual!  Like, notably unusual!

I think there are both specific and general reasons that my two regular theaters aren’t playing it.  First, specifically for my local all-Indian theater, Neerja is held over another week.  Second, specifically for the other theater near me that usually gives one screen over to an Indian release, it is still reeling from being stuck with Fitoor for two weeks and isn’t taking a risk on anything else for a while.  So Jai Gangaajal is suffering over the unexpected success and unexpected failure of two other movies.

But I also think there may not have been enough prints available to cover the area.  Word is, there were 300 prints in total sent overseas.  Not clear yet how many were sent to America in particular, but I would guess around a hundred, or a little less.  About the same as for Neerja.  But Neerja played at my local suburban theaters and skipped the downtown theater.  So my additional supposition is a) this didn’t get as many prints as a really big blockbuster, because it’s a Prakash Jha film and the biggest star in it is a woman, and b) possibly with Priyanka’s higher American profile now, the distributors decided to bet on sending a print to the general downtown megaplex instead of the suburban desi-only theater.

The other reason I didn’t see it is because I really wasn’t excited or interested or curious about it.  Which seemed odd, since I am always interested in any film!  But then I saw a couple of articles which mentioned that Priyanka wasn’t able to give any time to the promotions.  Which explains why I wasn’t excited!

Being a fallible human person, I am just as likely to be swayed by a promotional campaign as anyone else.  Without any tweets revealing posters or a big music release party or random interviews dropping plot points or a soundtrack coming out song by song, I just couldn’t get myself pumped up about it.

So, with the lack of promotions and lack of availability, I am kind of wondering how this film will do.  I am guessing, badly!  Early box office indications are mixed.  First reports said only 10 to 15% occupancy for Friday shows.  But it made 5.5 crore opening day, which is pretty good.  On the other hand, it had a massive number of screens in India, 2684.  So actually, it could swing 5.5 crore with only minimal occupancy.

This goes back to my earlier post about the surprise success of Neerja.  If you look back at the history of release strategies for female lead films in India, it is always wrong.  They either bet on the wrong horse, thinking a female lead film will have the kind of star-opening power as a male-lead film instead of looking at the actual quality of the film, the character, and the narrative; or get the right horse (like Neerja), but don’t realize what they have and give it a tiny release until word of mouth proves its success.

I’m kind of thinking right here we have both mistakes happening with two different films.  Neerja made 4.7 crore opening day on 700 screens; Jai Gangaajal made 5.5 on 2684.  Probably should have given a few more screens to the female lead movie with the savvy promotional campaign, great soundtrack, excellent story, and star who devoted months of her life to making sure it was a hit, rather than to the one with no promotion, no star in sight, and (based on the reviews) not that great of a story.