Some intelligent and high-voltage marketing made Peepli Live appeal to a wider range of audience than is usual for low-budget movies
Awards never held Aamir Khan’s imagination. The Hindi movie superstar, director and producer is known for abstaining from movie award nights. But he did not play down the award and recognition his recent co-production has won him. Peepli Live received kudos at a slew of international film festivals — the Sundance Film Festival, the Berlin International Film Festival, the Durban International Film Festival, the Edinburgh Film Festival and the Melbourne International Film Festival.
At the box office, it has raked in Rs 34.5 crore (gross) and $1.1 million internationally, which is comparable to big-budget movies. Made on a total budget of Rs 10 crore (an additional Rs 4 crore was spent on marketing), Peepli Live neither had a star-spangled cast (audiences were familiar with only two of the cast members, Naseeruddin Shah in a cameo and Raghuvir Yadav) nor a breezy theme. With most actors hailing from the late playwright Habib Tanvir’s theatre troupe Naya Theatre, the movie dwells on the socio-political issue of farmers being driven to suicide as an escape from abject poverty and the media and political response to one such farmer.
Peepli’s people
The writer-director whose script won over both the seasoned producers, Aamir Khan and UTV Motion Pictures (UTV), Anusha Rizvi, says the treatment mattered. It was not a dry documentary but was treated as a satire that would endear the movie to the audience. While the reception at the different film festivals vetted the movie’s merits, it also set the producers to plan for marketing that would take the movie’s appeal to a wider range of audience than is usual for low-budget movies with an eclectic cast. UTV Motion Picture Chief Executive Officer Siddharth Roy Kapur says: “We never looked at it as a small movie. We always saw it as having the potential to do the numbers of a big film if marketed right. It had the potential to break through to mainstream audience. It also helped that Aamir (Khan) backed the movie. While Anusha (Rizvi) made a fabulous film, Aamir made it larger than life. He drew audiences that probably otherwise wouldn’t come at first go.”
Critic and trade analyst Taran Adarsh agrees: “It is not a conventional movie to show such numbers that an Abhishek Bacchan- or Ranbir Kapoor-starrer would show. Khan’s association alone, even though he has not acted in it, has ensured the movie got an enviable opening week.” Not only did the actor lead to an increased buzz pre-release, but he recovered the film’s cost of production just by selling the satellite rights to Zee TV (for Rs 10 crore). Its music rights got sold for Rs 4 crore to T-Series.
Khan’s panache in marketing films has become increasingly evident. What started with Ghajini reached a crest with 3-Idiots which became the biggest grosser at the Hindi box office. But the challenge for Peepli Live was double-fold. Khan was not starring in the movie and it had the trappings of an arthouse film, a genre with very few takers in India to ensure commercial success. Khan says, “We had to establish in our promotions that it is from Aamir Khan Productions so that the trust and faith that I have earned so far would get it noticed. Second, we had to allow the movie’s matter speak for itself. There are movies which are watched by fans because of a star actor or director. But the hook for movies like Peepli Live and Jaane Tu... has to be the plot. So, promos become the backbone of the movies’ marketing.” That is where UTV, the co-producer, stepped in.
To be or not to be odd
Roy Kapur says, “We were clear that our promotions should reflect the tone of the film. We ensured that the entire cast of the movie was present in promotions and was not restricted to just one or two people since it was a story about the entire village.” UTV Motion Pictures Senior Vice- President (Marketing) Shikha Kapoor adds: “We stayed away from using Khan in any publicity material for the film.” Khan chipped in when it came to the public relations initiatives and appearances at events.
The promos took centrestage. At the start of the campaign, the team got a whiff of the audience feedback. Kapoor says, “We were unanimously told that it is a strange-looking movie in the first week. Our posters in bold pink with the entire family from the movie, for example. We had to bring out the nuances of the plot without putting off audiences.” For the eight weeks that lay head of it before the release, the team comprising Khan and UTV had its task cut out: To make the movie more accessible by taking it to places that the general film-going audience frequent and by cutting promos that would bring out the humour in the plot.
To make it more accessible to the urban audience, the music was released at the popular music club for live performances, Bluefrog, in Mumbai. Not only did the Delhi-based band Indian Ocean, which composed the score, perform but folk singers from Badwai, Madhya Pradesh (where the film was shot), were brought in to perform the song ‘Mehngai’ as was the entire cast of the movie. “It was an example of how we tried to bridge the urban-rural divide for the audience to cross,” adds Khan. The popular TV show Indian Idol too saw the director and Khan along with the entire cast discuss the film and cheer the participants.
Promos, which accounted for nearly 200 hours on TV, were flagged off by a teaser which took a dig at Khan as the producer of Peepli Live, at once associating the actor with the movie and setting the tone of candid humour that characterises the plot. The lead promo distilled the moment of the helpless farmer’s dilemma which was humourous without being melodramatic. Most of the promos were shot separately, rather than just edited from the movie, to generate a viral campaign — “It got everybody talking,” points out Kapoor. The promos ensured that the issue did not daunt audiences by communicating the satire and also familiarised audience with the characters of the movie. Different characters such as the mother of the farmer, his brother, friends, reporters and politicians drawn into the whirlpool gave their takes on Natha’s impending suicide. Without giving away the denouement, they generated the right amount of curiosity
“On TV, we consciously tried to be present at places where hardcore Bollywood entertainment was played and be as frequent as a big-budget movie would be,” says Kapoor. Averaging 80 promos a day, Peepli Live’s promos primarily ran on Hindi general entertainment channels, Hindi movie channels, regional channels such as Mahuaa TV and music channels, while the PR team followed up with one-on-one interviews of the director, producer and actors with news channels. The noise made on TV accounted for 60 per cent of the entire campaign, according to Kapoor. “We wanted to be seen with every other release and not stand out as odd,” adds Kapoor.
Reading the audience
UTV’s regular tracking of audience’s desirability to watch and top of the mind recall of the movie ensured that any slump in interest was arrested immediately. A couple of weeks before the release, UTV’s tracking revealed that interest levels were stagnant. To give it one last push, UTV produced radio promos on the same lines as the TV promos and launched an aggressive outdoor campaign in Mumbai which included milestone signs of ‘Peepli Live 0 km away’ to declare its imminent release.
The result was collections that would not have been met by just the experimental multiplex crowd but also smaller towns in the Hindi belt such as Meerut, Varanasi, Ajmer and Gwalior. Along with multiplexes, single screens also helped it garner first weekend earnings of Rs 22 crore.
The earnings also reflect the canny distribution that the team did. With an initial target of 200 screens before the promotions began, the final number of screens it is running on is 750. “We always keep a tab on the exhibition sector such as theatre chains which have a firm finger on the audience’s pulse. Once we started promoting the movie, they conveyed to us the buzz was mounting. They were receiving more inquiries from the audience. So, our estimates kept going up over the weeks from 200 to 400 to the final 700 or so screens. Since, printing occurs at the last minute, updating the target was not a problem,” informs Khan.
Big on the international circuit
The urge to take the movie beyond arthouse audiences got sowed early in the year when Peepli Live was doing the rounds of international film festivals. UTV Motion Pictures Senior Vice-president (international distribution and syndication) Amrita Pandey says: “There were different kinds of people liking the movie. We got to screen the movie in 8 to 10 screens in Germany, a Poland-based distributor asked for prints. It made us take stock of what we wanted to do with the movie.” If in India it meant taking the movie to regular Bollywood haunts, abroad it meant casting a wider net to include arthouse cinemas which played foreign-language movies, helped on by the international critical acclaim the movie received. Cinema Nova in Australia, Landmark Theatres in USA and Curzon Cinemas in the UK were a few cinema chains which took up Peepli Live. “Otherwise, these would not even consider the regular Bollywood movies,” explains Pandey. These theatres ensured that Peepli Live was not restricted to South Asian viewers.
Apart from these premiere theatres, Peepli Live was screened at a handful of popular theatres frequented by South Asians instead of the entire lot catering to them. Promotion material tailored for an international audience also helped. The US recorded $364,000 in the opening weekend on 64 prints (now $600,000), while West Asia, despite Ramzaan and the ensuring restrictions, clocked $175,000 on 18 prints (now $300,000) and Australia $43,009 on six prints (now $80,000). Other countries returned $59,000 (now $130,000). What helped such opening numbers — that were more than some recent multi-starrers — was the adulation from the mainstream media in these countries. UTV took Khan to the US, for example, and made him camp in different cities to interact with the media. “Even South Asians who would not have gone for a Hindi movie were hooked on by the coverage,” explains Roy Kapur. The film will be released in the UK on September 24.
Not all small-budget movies will have such a high-voltage backing in the future and not all first-time director-writers will be able to win over producers as Rizvi has done. It will have to be seen if this could get more film makers confident or was it a case of the right stars converging together?
