Film-Watching Turns Costly For Indian Middle Class

The COVID-19 pandemic changed the entire business dynamics of the film industry. In the recent past, we have seen an enormous hike in the ticket rates for films like RRR, Acharya, and Sarkaru Vaari Paata.

This resulted in low occupancies across many centers. People are not showing interest to get into theatres by shelling out heavy amounts of money. Instead, they are opting to watch those films on OTT platforms.

These days, every movie is landing on the OTT arena within a month of its release. Thus, people are finding it easy to wait for a month and watch it conveniently at home rather than spending a lot of money and going to theatres.

But here comes the twist. After theatres, now OTT platforms have found a new way to loot money from people. These platforms have started premiering big films in the pay-per-view model. Already, KGF Chapter:2 is available on Amazon Prime Video on the pay-per-view model. RRR will premiere on Zee5 on May 20 with the same model.

This means, that people have to pay extra money to watch these films for one time, even though they are existing subscribers of the OTT platforms. This strategy is now baffling audiences and many people have opined that the filmmakers made the movie-watching experience a luxurious affair.

Not only RRR and KGF 2 but many other upcoming big films are expected to follow this strategy in the coming days.

If that is the case, the film-watching experience is going to be a costly affair for a middle-class family in India.