Sanjay Chhabria, founder and CEO of Everest Entertainment has produced 25 Marathi films including hits such as Mee Shivajiraje Bhosale Boltoy. Everest also has the rights to 300 films. “About a decade back the average budget for a Marathi film was Rs. 80 lakh to Rs. 2 crore. We could release it across 20-30 screens. Now the average budgets are Rs. 3-5 crore and many films release in 300-400 screens,” said Chhabria, who comes from an old film financing family. He finds Marathi cinema a comfortable place in which to work. “It is an expanding market. I like the people, the culture. Also, Marathi has four established general entertainment channels with strong audiences and viewership,” he said.
That is arguably the most important pre-requisite for smaller non-Hindi cinemas to thrive. More than 57% of all TV viewership in India goes to languages other than Hindi going by data from the Broadcast Audience Research Council (BARC). However, unlike Hindi which is spoken by over 500 million people, most Indian languages are spoken by about 60-70 million people each. These may or may not be lucrative markets. Therefore, not all have the creative ecosystem that can support local cinema. The demand for programming from Zee Marathi, Star Pravah or Colors Marathi creates a demand for writers, directors, technicians et al bringing in steady work and money. This is the first reason a good broadcast business in any language helps.
The second follows from this. Star Pravah or Colors Marathi are also huge buyers and at times, producers of local cinema to fill their 24-hour channels. Zee Studios, for instance, has made movies like Sairat and Ti Sadya Kai Kartey among others. They amplify what would have been just a state-level film onto broadcast and if it resonates, the film could find a national audience too, like Sairat did. Note that all the languages that have a strong television ecosystem and market – Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Marathi – have cinemas which have taken the vicissitudes of the business well.