It has become a fashion of sort these days in Tollywood to announce ‘fake’ Box Office numbers and thus claim the craze that is ‘pseudo’ or ‘fugazi’ actually. This in turn claim the Box Office records.
Unlike Bollywood and US Box Office markets that have standard practice to scale the box office collections, Tollywood market is still volatile.
While there’s a standard formula in Hindi to calculate the shares to gross, there’re a lot of equations, formulas to collect shares in Telugu industry and the formulas change from region to region, distributor to distributor etc. Above all it depends on the understanding between producer and distributor, and what’s mentioned in the agreement like sharing or outright or advance system et al. And the overflows is another ball game altogether. How much overflows producers really get in return for hit film, superhit film, blockbuster film is still unknown.
Simply put, it’s a complex method and it’s not possible to evaluate the approximate numbers let alone the original figures.
Taking advantage of this, producers and directors are dancing to the tunes of star heroes and thus helping them claim the records. In what can be heights of this, it’s rumoured that mana ‘trade masters’ are even manipulating US BO numbers in their own way.
Currently, there’s a joke doing the rounds in industry circles that just like how it’s said Top 5 collected films, it’d also be good to announce Top 5 fake collections. Well, it’s a joke as of now. And no, it’s not everyone is bad.
There are a few stars, producers in the Telugu who are averse to Box Office numbers and records. Kudos to them who’re still striving for a healthy atmosphere in the industry.