AB-Ash vs January jinx - First weekend advance rush ratifies GuruÂ’s selective release strategy PRATIM D. GUPTA Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai in Guru
Will Abhishek Bachchan and Aishwarya Rai finally get as much attention on screen as they get off it? Will Mani Ratnam finally score at the box-office with an original Hindi film? Will Guru finally break the January jinx plaguing Bollywood for the past few years? If the advance bookings for the first weekend at the Calcutta theatres are anything to go by, the answer to all the above questions is “yes”. Within a couple of hours of the advances opening on Wednesday, 50 per cent of tickets for the seven-shows-a-day weekend had gone at INOX (Forum) and no less than nine shows block-booked. Adopting a strategy strictly against the Bollywood ploy of flooding the market with hundreds of prints, Guru’s city distributor Shree Venkatesh Films is releasing the film with as few as 12 prints. “We are very confident about Guru and do not want to exhaust the business in a couple of weeks by releasing the film with lots of prints,” discloses Mahendra Soni of Shree Venkatesh Films. “We plan to add more prints every week, as the word-of-mouth spreads,” he adds. In 2006, only Vivah had tried this strategy and the Rajshri production went on to become a big hit, growing stronger with every passing week. Guru is an acid test for the Abhishek-Ash pair which has had a 100 per cent failure record (on screen) and even constant talk of marriage couldn’t salvage the grandiose Umrao Jaan a couple of months ago. The same holds for Mani Ratnam, whose Dil Se and Yuva couldn’t find favour with the audiences. “That is all history,” says Vikas Syal, general manager of INOX (Forum). “The Guru promos have created a lot of buzz and it will get a great opening.” The reason for the box-office rush, however, can lie more in the lack than the longing. “There has been no major release since Bhagam Bhag (December 22),” points out Prashant Shrivastava of 89 Cinemas. “People have now got into the habit of watching new Bollywood movies every week; so the eagerness to catch Guru is quite obvious.” But AB-Ash have less than two weeks to deliver before the starry Salaam-e-Ishq arrives on January 25
