If you are in India and watch films you would’ve noticed the press, movie fans and cinema industry experts constantly raving about the success of films that have crossed the magical Rs.100  CR mark.

Tweets that proclaim the success of films usually include this statistic. I examined this benchmark for success more closely and here’s what I found :–

An average ticket costs between Rs.120-Rs.1000 in India and worldwide (I did the currency conversion alright) .

Assuming an average price of Rs.150 per ticket, the number of people who see a “Successful film” (say a film that has grossed 120 crores) is 120,00,00,000/150 is 800000 or 8 million views.Since there is no way to determine how many moviegoers watched the movie multiple times,let’s assume there were 500,000 duplicate views and so there are 7.5 million unique views which is equivalent to 7.5 million fans .The population of the Indian Diaspora is close to 1.5 billion world wide. So, the impact percentage of a successful film is

(7,500,000/1,500,000,000)*100=0.5

For a film that grosses 240 crores , the impact percentage is 1% of the total population of Indian diaspora!

(for the sake of this argument, “impact percentage” means the percentage of people who get to watch the movie against total available viewers )

Hence , a Tamil film is far more successful than any Hindi film as the population of the Tamil-speaking population is 77 million and hence to gross in excess of 100 crores,a Tamil movie should strive to achieve a impact percentage of 10% (taking into account non-Tamil speaking fans who watch these films).

On the other hand, a Hindi film that has a wider world audience can easily gross over 100 crores with the right distribution network while achieving a impact percentage of 1 or 2. A case in point being Shah Rukh Khan’s  Chennai Express which attracted more Tamil fans than usual (by strategically placing a tribute song to Rajnikanth at the very end of the movie) and still has a impact percentage of less than 3!!

These films then have “success bashes” which attract a lot of sponsors besides attracting a lot of TV viewers who watch and rave about the film’s “success”.

The new benchmark for measuring blockbuster success should be atleast Rs.1000 crores.What do you think?

Further Reading:

Our films should collect as much as Avatar, 100 cr is too less: SRK