Tollywood's flop show continues

It's the same old script. The star-driven, formulaic Telugu film industry's magic failed to cast a spell for the third consecutive year, as Tollywood continued its flop show in 2005.

As per the statistics of the Andhra Pradesh Film Chamber of Commerce (APFCC), 131 straight and 60 dubbed films were released till December 29.

According to the trade pundits, of the approximate Rs 350 crore invested in these films, nearly Rs 250 crore went down the drain, thanks to the 120-odd straight films, including a dozen big-budget movies, that bombed at the box office.

Not that there is no silver lining to the industry. The year 2005 turned out to be lucky for dubbing movies from Tamil as six movies "� Rajnikanth-starrer Chandramukhi, Vikram's Aparichitudu (Anniyan in Tamil), Simbu's Manmadha (Manmathan), Surya's Gajini and Aaru, and a shoe-string budget movie Premiste (Kadal) "� set the cash registers ringing.

Only a few Telugu movies including the Prabhu Deva-directed Nuvvosthanante Ne Voddantana, power major Lanco group's maiden film Evadi Gola Vadidhe, Mahesh Babu's Athadu, Nagarjuna-Ayesha Takia-starrer Super and Athadokkade galloped to the 100-day mark. Chathraprati, Bhadra and Bhagiratha turned out to be average grossers.

Noted film director Siva Nageswara Rao attributed this to two factors "� lack of good storyline and spiralling production costs.

"There is no point in making big-budget movies that lack good storyline and scripts. Roping in big stars or going in for mega combinations too doesn't always work. It's the story-telling and packaging that ensure crowds to the theatre. And that's where the Tamil movies scored," he said.

"Removal of the slab system on entertainment tax, innovative ideas like merchandising T-shirts to promote movies or the recent GO allowing producers of big films to increase the prices of two upper class tickets by 75 per cent in the first two weeks can help only to a small extent in giving fillip to the flagging fortunes of the industry," he added.

Industry watchers say that the 'want-more' attitude of the Telugu producers has led to this tumultuous situation.

"Last year, the source material for Telugu films came from remakes. Producers doled out lump sum amounts to grab the remake rights of Tamil and Malayalam blockbusters. This year, they went for dubbing rights of Tamil movies, little knowing that they would be eating into their revenues. It's time the producers learned from the previous snafus," a film critic said on anonymity.

Against this backdrop of flops outnumbering the hits, a few mega-budget movies including the Venkatesh-starrer Lakshmi and Pawan Kalyan-starrer Annavaram and Bangaram, Nagarjuna's devotional film Sri Ramdas are slated for a release in 2006. It remains to be seen if these films hit the purple patch, they say.