Rahul Bose on Thursday said that after the box office debacle of his last film, sports biopic, "Poorna: Courage Has No Limit", he will never produce a movie that does not have a star headliner.
Poorna is based on a true story of Malavath Poorna, a tribal girl from Telangana who created history on May 25, 2014 by becoming the youngest girl in the world to scale the Mount Everest at the age of 13.
Aditi Inamdar, a Telangana girl, portrayed Poorna on screen.
The abysmal performance of the film at the ticket window especially in tier-II towns, "really broke my heart", Bose, who also directed the film, said.
"Everybody thinks it was really gutsy to make a Rs 10 crore film on a 13-year-old girl climbing Mt Everest. I just thought it was a fantastic mainstream film. 'Little girl climbs Everest, holds Indian flag' what can get more mainstream than this? I wondered.
"The biggest reality check that I got after making 'Poorna', which also defines the Hindi film industry, this would be the last mainstream film to be made with... As a producer, never will I make a film that doesn't have a recognisable face," he said.
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The actor-director was speaking at a panel discussion 'Redefining Stories' at the ongoing International Film Festival of India (IFFI).
Bose emphasised on the unwillingness of the smaller towns of giving chances to a film as "mainstream" as "Poorna", which only clicked in major cities such as Mumbai, New Delhi, Kolkata, Chennai, Bangalore, Chandigarh, Pune and Ahmedabad.
"The film vanished everywhere else. India, apart from these 8 cities, is not interested in, forget about a good film, a mainstream film (that is) without a face. You can say there are new stories and Bollywood is changing. But if you don't have a recognised face, go home," he added.
As the trend of sports dramas continues to enjoy an upswing in Hindi cinema such as "Gold" and "Soorma", Bose said such films work only if it is fronted by a known face.
"There are so many sports films made with huge actors, which are really good. But that Rs 600 thousand crore thing... Because the actor has the heft. That's who people come to see. You don't care about what Tom Cruise is playing. You want to see Tom Cruise, which is fantastic."
"Yesterday, I got an offer to release the film in China. The profits will start coming in from there now - one-and-a-half years after the release of the film."