“Happy New Year Is A Disaster Although Well Marketed”

Happy New Year was the year’s most anticipated film. With an ensemble star cast and of course being Shah Rukh Khan’s Diwali release, there were high expectations from it. In terms of business, even though the film has made it to the 200 crore club domestically, the performance has been much lower than expected. A  reader tells us what worked for Happy New Year in terms of marketing but why the film could not perform that well.

It was a new way of promoting the movie by going every corners of the country and almost covering the globe. It was the producer who played the lead role who took the initiative and the strategy was a novel one to make sure the audience irrespective of his fans or not were made aware of the release of a big budgeted movie in terms of production as well as promotion costs. The trick worked very well on the first release day by collecting a mammoth total around 44 crores that not even any Bollywood movie had ever thought about.

Now, the movie on its 20th day after the release is standing at a total domestic collection of 200.50 crores. If we are deducting the first day, it could only gather around 156 crores in 18 days. Movies like 3 Idiots, Kick, Chennai Express, Krrish 3 and the reigning topper Dhoom 3 were able to collect much better collections, among which only 3 Idiots can only claim a well-crafted script and story.

So it clearly says that the movie was disappointing to the viewers and also to the distributor (YRF) which they have to compensate with the movies like Kill Dil which is releasing on November 2014. The producer stays happy as he got the ROI before the release itself. So he can celebrate the New Year happily.

Coming to the roles of other actors like Boman, Sonu, Abhishek, Vivaan, Deepika, and the director. Rather than acting or directing, their main role was like sales executives of the company trying to impress a customer to buy their product. They proved to be good at their jobs and it was only the product which made the customer dissatisfied. They might have also travelled more for promotion and spend more time compared with the actual shooting schedule. Hope they have compensated well also.

As a suggestion to the producer, who is one of the top actor in India, in terms of the fan following around the globe, he could make some good movies which can be commercially successful like Kal Ho Na Ho, Veer Zaara etc which has the caliber to collect more than 300 crores in the present circumstances and can take the industry to a higher level which we all are expecting from him.