image source, AVATAR/TWITTER
Theater owners say they will not pay more than 55 percent to distributors for English films screened in Tamil Nadu and for films dubbed and released from other languages. what is the reason?
The Tamil Nadu Film Owners Association has passed a resolution on December 22. According to the resolution, from January 1, distributors will not pay more than 55 per cent as a share for English films and films dubbed from other languages.
For theaters in Tamil Nadu, the amount that goes from the films screened to the film’s distributors is at different rates. This share ratio is completely different for straight Tamil films and English, other language films and films dubbed from other languages.
For live Tamil films, theater owners’ share will start at 25 percent in the first week and will continue to increase. For English and dubbed films, it starts at fifty percent and goes up.
But the trouble started with the recently released blockbuster Avatar 2. Theaters that wanted to screen the film in English and Tamil were told to take 30 percent share and give 70 percent share to the distributors.
Many theaters in Chennai do not accept this. Due to this, the film did not open on the first day in some theatres. Some movie theater owners openly expressed this.
Then, after many rounds of negotiations, the English film was released in these theaters only the next day.
image source, Getty Images
“They asked for 70 per cent share for that English film. Because of this, some people did not screen the film. We have taken this decision so that this situation does not happen in the future,” Sridhar, joint secretary of the Tamil Nadu Theater Owners’ Association, told the BBC.
In case of Tamil movies, the number of fans remains the same for at least one week. But, many English movies drop below 10 even on the next day of the dubbing movies. The total amount generated from this is not enough to pay the electricity bill for that show in the theatre. In that case, the theater owners say how to pay more than 50 percent of the ticket fee of those ten people as a share.
Moreover, the distributors have agreed to 55 percent share in the states of Karnataka and Kerala, and only in Tamil Nadu, the cinema owners have passed this decision.
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