Rizwan Ahamd, director of the Instructional Media Centre, Maulana Azad National Urdu University (MANUU), Hyderabad took a masterclass on the subject ‘expanded cinema from screens to OTT platforms in the post-COVID era’ at the ongoing Mumbai International Film Festival (MIFF) on Wednesday.
Ahamd mostly spoke about how OTT content has boomed since the emergence of the coronavirus. But, contrary to what a section of people feels, he doesn’t believe that the medium poses a danger to cinema halls.
“Once television happened, people started saying it would kill cinemas and theatres would get closed,” he said. “Nothing happened, actually. This is a technical industry. Technical developments will keep on happening. Even OTT is not the final word. This is going to transcend. Another module will come in OTT itself. These developments will keep on happening. Each development will keep on challenging the previous one.”
He added that if one says that OTT is the death of cinema, then Tenet (2021) would not have been a hit. He cited other examples of some films that were released amid the pandemic such as No Time To Die (2021), Dune (2021), The Batman (2022), RRR (2022), The Kashmir Files (2022) and KGF Chapter 2 (2022).
After the masterclass, Cinestaan.com pointed out to him that only the larger-than-life commercial films, like the ones cited by him, are doing well in theatres while sensible and moving films such as Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui (2021), Badhaai Do (2022) and Jersey (2022) have been rejected by theatre-goers despite having decent to good word-of-mouth publicity and reviews.
The academic, however, replied, “Things will change within two-three years. The way revenue had declined during the COVID-19 period, it was bound to increase due to these larger-than-life films. This was seen not just in India but also abroad. In the first slot, all big films were released because bigger money was at stake. Ultimately, cinema will come down to both platforms. This trend will ultimately settle in some time; 2022 can be said to be a buffer year. Maybe by 2023 or 2024 things will be better.”