Manoj Bajpayee Reacts to Impact of Animal on Joram, 'Box Office Obsession Has Ruined...' | Exclusive

2023 has been a year of blockbusters with films like Pathaan, Jawan, Gadar 3 and Animal creating havoc at the box office and shattering many previous records. However, Manoj Bajpayee rues that the excessive chatter surrounding a film’s box office business has rid cinema of its sanctity. In an exclusive chat with News18 Showsha, he said, “I’ve always spoken against the obsession with box office. I’ve always believed that it has ruined the culture of filmmaking in our country. Numbers being thrown at people’s faces isn’t the right thing to do.”

According to Bajpayee, what has caused more harm is that ‘even the audience has started speaking that language’ now. When prodded further, he explained, “In a conversation with them, they’ll suddenly quote the amount that a film has made. They feel that if a film has collected Rs 100 crore or above, it’s a very good film and that it qualifies for all kinds of honours in this country.”

The Gulmohar and Sirf Ek Bandaa Kaafi Hai actor stated that the need to create records has made filmmakers money-minded and come up with tactics to take the focus away from the art of storytelling. “This mind-set has ruined everything related to our cinema movement. It has done so much damage to the aspect of creativity in the film industry,” he pointed out.

Bajpayee further continued, “Now what happens is that when you’re making a film, you’re thinking about how to fool an audience to come to a theatre and come up with tricks to show that you’ve earned Rs 10 crore above its real collections on its first day. It’s like our key responsibility has changed completely. We’re now only thinking about how to make money from the word go, right from the script writing stage.”

His latest film, Joram, hit the big screen a week after Ranbir Kapoor’s Animal and Vicky Kaushal’s Sam Bahadur released. While Sam Bahadur opened to critical acclaim, Animal proved to be an instant money-spinner. Joram, on the other hand, might have earned many accolades at international film festivals but it failed to create ripples at the domestic box office.

Quiz him if the spill-over effect of Animal bothered him and Bajpayee candidly shared, “We knew that Animal and Sam Bahadur are two very big films. A lot of money was spent on both the films. There was and still a hype around Animal. But we couldn’t afford to spend that much money on our film because Joram was a different kind of a film and we could only allot a certain amount of money to promote and publicise it.”

However, he chose to focus on the silver lining and talking about it, he told us, “We didn’t want to over-burden our film. We were very practical and realistic about it. We knew that we couldn’t be idealistic about the situation and our film. And that’s why the pressure on us was less in terms of earning profits as quickly as possible.”