A huge section of the industry has been shock over the weekend due to the hugely negative response from majority of the audience to 83 but are the results really that shocking? The film is heading to become one of the biggest disaster of all times. A film like Thugs Of Hindostan is looking a good result against the 83 result and this film could turn out to be as big a disaster as Zero. Zero still had Shahrukh Khan to absorb the huge losses and basically meant him working for free for 2 years but here it will not be like that.

The results are going to be very bad as the film failed to find an audience and majority of the audience that came did not really think much of the film but that is not really shocking. The shock factor is that a huge section of the industry thought this was a very good film, infact many thought it was a actually a great film. The problem lies there as you are thinking that a nothing film is a great film so when it does not perform it becomes shocking when in reality the film is not that good so the performance is actually as per the film.

The people in the industry who were watching the film were comparing it to the likes of Sholay and Mughul E Azam and coming out with 300 cr, 400 cr, 500 cr and what not verdicts which was all laughable as on the trailer it looked to have a similar audience to Gully Boy with slight different geographical preferences. This is not about the box office number and neither is Gully Boy much of a film but like that film you can say 83 has a chance of 1 crore footfalls on a good day. Now these footfalls can give you 150 crore today or maybe 175 crore nett and on a best case scenario if the film collects like mad in premium multiplexes then these 1 crore footfalls can give you close to 200 crore nett. These 1 crore footfalls were a potential for a film like 83 before the pandemic which a Gully Boy did not actually reach so now they will probably be even less.

The film released on Friday and in a city like Jaipur which is among the top ten centres for Hindi films this film had an audience count of 7 at a multiplex in a morning show and 2 of this audience walked out and in a another screen in the same multiplex Pushpa (Hindi) on its second Friday was being screened with an audience count of 133. If this is what the industry thinks is a good or great then only god can save the film industry as obviously they will make more of these type of films. The point to note here is that Pushpa is not even a major HIT or anything in Jaipur or Rajasthan. It will do good to decent business in Rajasthan.

Basically 83 is sports docu - drama which is a bore and a difficult watch as story and screenplay goes out of the window and there is no character development whatsoever and just assuming that everyone knows the main characters of the film. This leads to be there being no relatability to the characters of the film and a film in this zone, the relatability is a must as its not a popcorn entertainer when you can get away with everything if the entertainment is there. Whatever emotions there are in the film can also only work if there is relatability.

A sports docu drama will generally be a bore for the audience in India especially outside the metros and here the problem is confounded as the film is among the top three most expensive Hindi films of all time. It can be said the budget for this type of film can be lower but that actually means the film will be even worse due to less resources but yes recovery may be easier.

The director had earlier made a film like Tubelight which fared badly but that was still more of an attempt to make a motion picture but it had very bad characterisation for a superstar which was hard for the audience to digest. Still on the budget that film did not perform too badly but the investors came in with a bid which equalled around 250 crore nett box office and the makers took it eyes closed as why risk the box office when someone ready to pay that much before release.

Coming back to 83 the film itself can be called a shocker but if thought logically the number of people watching the film is not much of a shock as it will probably get 60 odd lakh footfalls when a Gully Boy got 90 lakh pre pandemic. The industry and media thinking its a great film is another thing alltogether and nothing much can be done about that thought. Some of the media can be a PR stunt but if you think that you will get a bigger audience by getting all these five, six or seven stars then you are mad. Even family members of these so called reviewers may not go on the recomendation of this lot forget the paying public.

When a film goes wrong in this way and when the media and most of the indsutry has loved it there will be millions of excuses barring the real one which is the film is bad and it becomes even worse at the huge cost it has been made for. Even on Saturday there were murmours of Omicron being an issue but then someone from a rival studio came out with a classic statement that it seems that Omicron is doing a special surgical strike on the audiences of 83 while sparing the audiences of Spiderman - No Way Home and Pushpa (Hindi). This surgical strike seemed to be continuing on Monday as well with the other two holding far better than 83.

Post the pandemic Sooryavanshi and Pushpa (Hindi) have worked and its upto the industry to smell the coffee and not live in their own world of what is good and bad. When Sooryavanshi released a lot of industry which is praising 83 today was saying Sooryavanshi is a bad film but that is only your thought and eventually the film got results and maybe not everyone liked the film but a certain region of the country loved the film which was enough for the film on Diwali. Now Pushpa has actually flopped in its home market so again there is an issue with the film but its working bigtime in the same regions as Sooryavanshi so its down to the industry to figure this out.

Now whether 83 is as a big DISASTER as Zero or as big as FLOP as Thugs of Hindostan time will tell but one of these two outcomes is certain. There are films like Race 3 and Bharat which are called disasters when they are not even close to being disasters but then there are these type of films like 83 which perform far worse than those so called disasters and here the industry will say its a good film that did not do well at the box office as they themselves loved the film. Then on top you never know the makers may even have a success party to give a perception and again this perception will be lapped up by the media as they loved the film.

At the end of the day if you are not prepared to believe the audience verdict then the same sort of trash will be made again and again and the results most of the time will be the same. The bottom line again is that the problem is not that 83 will be a disaster as that will happen to many many films but the problem is the industry thinking its a great film as that thought leaves the industry in a limbo and unable to prosper. The sad part is the film is based on national heroes of the country who won a WORLD CUP and they deserved a better film which reached out to the audience.