Bid goodbye to 2007 — and to the old face of Bollywood. The year that has gone by shows that cinema is changing, and how!

Take the trends of the year. Cinema is going global, for Hollywood is now a partner. Big is not always beautiful, though some of the top heroes have admittedly become bigger than their films. And you can’t really make a flop unless you try very, very hard to do so. Two of the biggest names in the Mumbai film world — Sanjay Leela Bhansali and Ram Gopal Varma — are possibly doing a rethink about what makes a film click. And Shah Rukh Khan, with his film, Om Shanti Om, has demonstrated that you can never predict a flop or a hit.

The best thing about Bollywood today, industrywallahs stress, is the advent of a great many recovery streams. Sivaji is a case in point. The aerial telecast rights of the Rajnikanth blockbuster were sold to Singapore Airlines for a whopping US$ 600,000. The airline is screening the film on its flights.

“It is great that such revenue streams have opened up,” exclaims director Madhur Bhandarkar. “This will help meaningful cinema reach across to people who want to view them at leisure,” he adds.

The year also demonstrated that big can sometimes go bust, and small is often swell. The success of small-budget films such as Bheja Fry indicates that a film without stars can succeed. The film was produced at a cost of Rs 60 lakh — with most actors working free — and made over Rs 12 crore. “Good films are succeeding,” says Atul Mohan from the trade magazine Complete Cinema.What it also shows is that there are no set rules. Too much hype can harm — or benefit — a film, just as little publicity can be a boon as well as a bane. “A non-publicised film such as Jab We Met picked up only by word of mouth on account of being a very good product,” stresses Mohan.

A marketing blitz, on the other hand, didn’t help Bhansali, but worked for Om Shanti Om. “When you have a film like Saawariya opposite you and that too directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali, you need to promote your movie double than what you would normally do. That’s brought us results,” says Farah Khan, who directed Om Shanti Om.

So Om Shanti Om had audiences thronging the theatres while Saawariya started a downward slide on the second day itself. Yet even while Saawariya lost out on eyeballs, it made sure that it had recovered its costs.

Well before a film is released, it makes all its money. An effective marketing strategy helps film-makers sign on satellite and DVD deals so that they can recover as much of the cost as possible before a film’s launch, and judge their success or failure depending on the first two days’ response. UTV’s Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal recovered its Rs 15 crore production cost even before it hit the marquee. Merchandise deals, satellite contracts and other such tactics helped the producers recover the steep production costs even though the film failed to score a goal at the box office.

The trend also means that DVDs are hitting the market earlier than usual. There was a time when a DVD print followed a film months after its release. No longer. Now fear of piracy has prompted producers to go in for an early release of DVDs and CDs. As a result, the fate of most films is clear within a couple of days and the collections are there for all to see in a couple of weeks.

“Film-makers are adopting the American system. Revenues have opened up and so have the markets. The players are many and so are the takers. The shelf life of films today is short and distributors are focusing on the first weekend to recover their costs,” says trade analyst Taran Adarsh.

Another startling fact is that multiplexes, which form less than one per cent of the number of theatres across the country, collect over 35 per cent of the total revenue, with 11,000 single screen theatres across India together accounting for only 65 per cent of the revenue.

With the moolah being raked in, actors — and a few actresses — are making money like never before. And while actresses are still grossly underpaid when compared to actors, with the success of Jab We Met Kareena Kapoor has hit the jackpot. She is being paid Rs 3.5 crore for her new film — which was the production cost of her 2003 film Chameli. But Kapoor is nowhere near Shah Rukh Khan — who got Rs 40 crore ‘for Om Shanti Om.’

Salman Khan is being paid Rs 24 crore for his new film — roughly based on Tarzan — being produced by Ashtavinayak. For a while, the industry had speculated that the amount was not for one film but a series that he had signed on. But Khan debunks that. “The deal is for just one film and not two or three films as is being contemplated and written about,” he says.

Akshay Kumar, too, is charging a similar amount for his new films. “It’s not just me, even Bollywood has been making good money,” says Kumar, who is also signing films in collaboration with Hollywood studios.

Hit or no hit, Bollywood is a rich man’s world — and no one is complaining.