Did Hero-Centric Industry Formed In A Day?

One comment that’s being heard big time right now is nothing but to dismantle the hero-centric industry that’s prevalent in Tollywood now. Paying high remuneration to heroes, spending exuberantly on the films, and so. At this juncture, it’s worth noting that this hero-centric industry wasn’t built in a day, and that it will be broken up in a day.

Back in the 90s, when almost all the movies were made with the same budgets, the films of Chiranjeevi, Balakrishna, and Nagarjuna started to do extremely well at the box office. While other films collected merely 1-2 crores in their full run at the box office, films of Chiranjeevi, like Hitler, a remake, collected 20+ crores in the mid 90s. Around the same time, Nagarjuna’s Hello Brother also collected around 18+ crores gross. Since then, a belief started that if someone makes a film with Chiranjeevi or Nagarjuna, with a budget of under 5 crores, the profits are just double, no matter how the film performs. That paved the way to the 2000s, where hero-centric movies started to do exceptionally well at the box office.

Over the last 25 years, producers have been investing money in names only, hero, heroine, music director, and so on, and whether the content clicked or not, they made their money. And in 2016, with the arrival of Amazon Prime and Netflix, the OTT era officially started, with films just like that making ₹20 crores profit just like that. While the theatrical business is getting dented for medium-range films now, the OTT payment is literally saving them. And that’s also centred around heroes only, while OTTs ask for story and pre-watching of a film in the case of medium and small range movies.

So, the hero-centric industry formed over a long time and over time, it became deeper. So how this would will get broken or reshaped is something we have to see from the corner seats of theatres.