Paisa phenk, tamasha dekh

Budgets for Bollywood films are getting bigger by the day. TOI finds out where all the moolah is going.

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Stills from Welcome.More picsWhen filmmaker George Lucas recently said, ��Big-budget movies will soon be history��, he wasn��t talking about Bollywood. Because going by the recent trend, the Hindi film industry seems to be growing bigger in terms of money spent on a project.
��The star cast of a film decides the budget today,�� says trade analyst, Taran Adarsh.��If you��re making a multi-starrer, that takes care of half your accounts. It also ensures good returns,�� he says.
Siddharth Roy Kapur, CEO of a production house, agrees and says corporates and production houses invest huge bucks in a film and treat it as an individual business project. ��Every aspect of a film is taken care of. It��s a package. Cost of the location, sets, costumes, actors, print costs, publicity �� standards are set in each of these areas,�� he says.
Not all big-budget films succeed at the BO though. Last year, while Partner, Om Shanti Om and Welcome were big-budget blockbusters, Salaam-e-Ishq, Ekalavya, Jhoom Barabar Jhoom and Saawariya were disasters.

Filmmakers have set a standard of sorts for themselves and their contemporaries with the kind of films made in the recent past, Siddharth adds. ��Movies, these days, are made at a certain scale. But at the end of the day, it��s the content that matters. The script dictates how much money you need to put in. If it can��t be made below a certain scale, we will make no compromises,�� says he.
Adds filmmaker Apoorva Lakhia, ��A multi-starrer, an action film or a film set abroad are genres that need to be backed by a big budget.�� His next venture is one such movie. ��Mission Istanbul is a 25-crore product. It��s an action-packed story and most of it has been shot in Istanbul. We needed to blow up cars, hire choppers, fly down an entire crew to Istanbul. It��s impossible to do all this with a restricted budget,�� he says, while pointing out that had he made the same film with a Shootout at Lokhandwala cast, the value would have automatically gone up to 40 crores. That��s how much Tashan costed the makers.
While Taran says that Race and Jodhaa Akbar were two films that did justice to the money spent, Siddharth says Delli 6 and Main or Mrs Khanna are two other biggies to watch out for this year.
��When a filmmaker claims to have spent massively on a film, it should show on screen. That��s why Jodhaa Akbar and Race were super hits. When you take in the lavishness of these films on 70mm, you know where the money has gone. The jewellery, the cars, the item numbers... every dime is accounted for,�� says Taran.

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