Sorry Bhai!

Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!

Bollywood has been badly hit by the 26/11 terror attacks in Mumbai. People are scared to go to the theatres. Neither are they in a mood to be entertained —and the business has suffered badly. Since the Mumbai territory brings in the most revenue, ticket sales have taken a good beating. Last Friday’s four releases — Dil Kabaddi, Maharathi, Meerabai Not Out and Oh! My God!! — kicked off with a dismal start at the box office. Though it wasn’t a case of good content going to waste. None of the films was good enough to swing things around.

That’s what brings us to the two releases the week before. Sorry Bhai! and Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! released on November 28, two days after the terrorists took over the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel, when the gunfire and grenades were still bursting inside the hotels and Nariman House.

Sorry Bhai! sank without a trace. Oye Lucky! just about managed to see through the first week. Both the directors were Bengalis — Onir (My Brother... Nikhil) and Dibakar Banerjee (Khosla Ka Ghosla).

“All over the country people were more on to television... films were not in the scheme of things,” Onir told t2. “Fear and guilt made sure that no one turned up at the cinema halls, especially that week.”

Sorry Bhai! collected less than Rs 25 lakh in the first week in Mumbai. Oye Lucky! collected around Rs 90 lakh. Compare the figures to the Rs 6.2 crore revenue Dostana netted in Week One and you know how badly the 28/11 releases have done.

“Every one, including myself and the rest of the cast and crew of Lucky, were too shocked to think about how our film was doing at the theatres,” said Dibakar Banerjee. “I later got to know that many of the single screens in Mumbai didn’t even open on Friday.”

But after the attacks started on Wednesday, couldn’t the makers of the two films — Mumbai Mantra for Sorry Bhai! and UTV for Oye Lucky! — hold back the Friday releases?

“That was not possible because of piracy,” Onir said. “The prints of the film had already gone out to all the cities across the country and we couldn’t have been able to curb piracy. In two days, DVDs of Sorry Bhai! were selling for $9 in Chicago. We couldn’t have had a later release because everyone would have seen the film by then.”

The worst part, the filmmakers feel, is that in the face of a national calamity you can push your films only that much. “I can’t even tell my friends to go and watch my film... I feel like a selfish person doing that. All I could do was watch helplessly how everything crumbled,” said Onir.