Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma (RGV) recently weighed in on the box office failure of Aamir Khan starrer Laal Singh Chaddha.
Aamir Khan's Laal Singh Chaddha has been the talk of the town ever since the film failed to live up to the expectations and turned out to be one of the biggest flops of the superstar's career. As per a India Today report, Aamir Khan's film's theatreical run ended with it earning under Rs 60 crore in the domestic box office, making it one of the biggest flops of recent times.
Meanwhile, RGV, while noting that people's attention span has decreased, courtesy of easily accessible content on OTT platforms and YouTube, told Bollywood Hungama that, "A few weeks back, I was in Bengaluru and met an acquaintance. I asked him about his movie viewing habits – how many times he goes to the theatres in a month and how many films he watches on OTT on average. To which he said that he and his wife have stopped going to the cinemas."
Ram Gopal Varma added, "As far as OTT is concerned, he told me that every once in a while, he and his better half make a plan to watch a film on a digital platform. They end up watching only the trailers for 30-40 minutes, unable to decide what to watch, and they go to sleep!" He further said, "But this is so true. The way the recommendations pop up, it’s so difficult to decide what to watch. Eventually, you’ll decide upon the recommendation from a friend."
READ: Aamir Khan's first photo after Laal Singh Chaddha's box office failure goes viral
Speaking about whether or not OTT is a threat to cinemas, Ram Gopal Varma opined that more than the streaming platforms YouTube was a bigger threat. He told the portal, "...I personally feel that YouTube is a threat. It comprises so many kinds of videos, from well-packaged news to funny comedy sketches to viral videos of scandalous stuff done by politicians. Hence, the attention span is going down...But with OTT and theatres, the mindset is that you have to invest 2-3 hours of your time. That kind of attention is going to keep decreasing in the future."
Ram Gopal varma said that sucha mindset where a viewer's attention span is decreasing and he/she feels the absence of a remote control where they can just go off and resume watching a movie/series is what has resulted in the poor box office performance of films in recent times.
In order to elaborate and prove his point, Ram Gopal Varma mentioned about Aamir Khan starrer Laal Singh Chaddha's dismal box office performance. He said, "Look at the box office scenario. Who would have imagined an Aamir Khan film would bomb so badly?" "If Aamir Khan doesn’t know how to make a hit film, then what happens to the rest?" he concluded.
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