Tadka question – Are you really getting all your money’s worth at ‘a screen near you’? If you thought ‘yes’, then here’s a reality check.
We have had Indian single-screen theatres and multiplex owners trimming some movies at their own free will for a long time, and the latest case involves cutting Jodhaa Akbar‘s running time in Patna by a whopping thirty minutes, including the sequence of Hrithik Roshan fighting the elephant, and Aishwarya Rai‘s confrontation with Ila Arun in the royal kitchen.
On one hand, the multiplex and hall owners cry for help against piracy urging the public to watch movies only at the big screen. On the other hand they take a free willed effort, to cut any movie’s any scene, just so they could accomodate one more show, leaving their own audiences cheated. These double standards might be known to only a handful of us, but surely they will incite a lot of viewers when they come to know that the hundred and fifty bucks (or even more) they paid to watch their favourite movie, might not have been complete at all.
Much as the movie audiences would like to see each and every bit of the movie, worked on so intricately, all that the hall owners want is to run as many shows as possible in a single day. All the lengthy movies, right from Sanjay Leela Bhansali‘s Devdas, which ran for exactly 181 minutes, to Ashutosh Gowariker‘s Academy Award nominated Lagaan, having a duration of almost four hours, were snipped to accomodate more shows of either the same movie, or the some other.
The problem is that these incidents are rarely reported and often leave the movie audiences feeling cheated, who after paying through their noses for some shows, are not shown the complete films. Devdas had three important scenes cut without any official consent, and the latest incident of Jodhaa Akbar takes it a bit too far this time, by allegedly cutting the running length by half an hour. The production houses themselves seem clueless on how to solve this problem, even though advances in the crackdown on piracy had left them elated not so long ago. What can one do, but wait and hope that either they get to experience it all, or never get to know that they were duped!
Sometimes, it is better to watch movies straight of the Internet rather than watching it in the multiplexes if those money-hungry, audience-cheating theater management keep cutting the movies…One is always surprised to see some scenes in a Xvid / original DVD that they did NOT see in the theaters.But as long as the multiplexes and the production houses generate more money from more shows accommodated, who cares about us audiences???