Ever since the actor announced his ambitious plan for DTH, it has been a match of bobbing and weaving with a section of theatre owners and film distributors who view the move as being detrimental to the theatre business.
Kamal Haasan’s novel move to leverage technology and create a new revenue stream for his film Vishwarooopam through a direct-to-home television premiere has suffered a temporary setback.
An official statement from Airtel CEO for DTH/Media Shashi Arora said: “In line with the postponement of the release date of the movie Vishwaroopam across theatres and DTH platform by Rajkamal Films, we have stopped booking for the movie premiere that was scheduled for January 10 at 9.30 p.m.”
Kamal Haasan’s spokesperson said the film maker did not want to make an official statement on the issue.
Ever since the actor announced his ambitious plan for DTH, it has been a match of bobbing and weaving with a section of theatre owners and film distributors who view the move as being detrimental to the theatre business.
Last week, the Tamil Nadu Theatre Owners Association and the Tamil Nadu Film Distributors Federation decided not to screen and distribute movies that are released on DTH platform. Subsequently, bookings were open only in a limited number of theatres for Vishwaroopam.
This copy has been corrected for some factual errors.
Keywords: Raajkamal Films International, Kamal Haasan, Vishwaroopam
I am sure Kamal Hassan is a sensible person. I hope he will listen to people. Monetary benifit should not make a smoke screen in his eyes. I hope he gets the money spent.
Actor Kamal Hasan is not only great actor, his way of thinking is entirely different from others, he always trying to introduce new technology in Tamil Cinema. Two decade ago He introduced racket technology in VIKRAM . He is a man of inspire with technology , through his eminence act he is depicting to our film industry what is new technology, therefore our Tamil film industry Kollywood people should give proper way to him to achieve lot .
We suppose to be appreciate him for this new idea...I dont think that the people who are all booked the tickets in DTH wil get a full experience. Everyone need to watch this Vishwaroopam in big screen so that they will feel the effort which is done by our Kamal....
Kamal's move is to be appreciated.
DTH belongs to high-upper class who generally won't come to the theatres (not to speak about the latest genre 'dine and see theatres')to see the movies. Thus 'DTH first' move willnot in a wee-bit affect the distributors and theatre owners. Their fear is totally unfounded.
Why can't Kamal take the distribution rights (100%) also in addition to DTH rights to usher in a new technology into the cine field.
If it is scuttled in the initial stage itself, then we are only to be blamed and not the actor.
Not sure why he wanted to please 1% of the niche segment and antagonize the rest 99%. The niche segment does not go to movies right off the release and would wait until the crowd starts to weaning a bit, or construct smaller capacity high end theaters like dinner and a movie, where the authentic content rich movies could draw out the 1% crowd he was aiming for. In this world of non-stop content availability ranging a broader array of spectrum, segmentation and knowledge of consumers to absorb and relate to the content is framented and one size does not fit all anymore and never it did anyway. I think there was a lesson learnt when he tried to make Vikram which did not go well with any segment as he was trying to cater to every segment, what should have been a sci thriller ended up as a bad carnage. He has good ideas and I hope he takes risk without trying to cater to all, does he need to anymore, anyway?
We need more Kamal Hasans to invent new business models. I had great hopes in his
new experiment. The result is irrelevant.
Opposition is traditional for all new approaches
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