During the five-day weekend that starts with Gandhi Jayanti on October 2 and continues until Bakri Id on October 6, the nation’s biggest film industry will be hard at work: it will be tracking the fortunes of the main Hindi releases during the period to determine whether it was wise to have burdened cinemas with two high-profile productions on the same date.

Bang Bang!, Siddharth Anand’s official remake of the Hollywood action comedy Knight and Day, opens on October 2 along with Haider, Vishal Bhardwaj’s Kashmir-set adaptation of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet. Common sense dictates that a mass entertainer such as Bang Bang! will blow away the competition, so a brooding tragedy such as Haider should have chosen some other day to emerge.

Bang Bang! is taking its name very seriously. Fox Star Studios is aiming to give it the largest-ever release for a Hindi movie – on an estimated 4,500 screens, including over 800 in 46 overseas territories. The movie has also been dubbed in Tamil and Telugu, but the number of screens in Tamil Nadu will depend on the law-and-order situation following the arrest of its former chief minister, J Jayalalithaa, on corruption charges. Haider, meanwhile, will open on approximately 1,000 screens in India and 300 abroad.

Once-in-a-year bonanza

If Haider has decided to jump into the ring, it’s because the Disney UTV co-production also wants to reap the box-office windfall from a once-in-a-year weekend extended by three public holidays. Distributors usually divide the calendar year into seasons, quite like the kharif and rabi crop cycles. The Diwali period, the summer holidays and the last week of the year are among the fertile periods. They are reserved for big-budget films featuring the most highly paid talent in the business.

The Indian film distribution scene has changed drastically from the 1990s, when producers were unable to fix release dates because they weren’t sure when exactly they would finish their movies, said Vinod Mirani, a veteran trade analyst. Now, Indian movies open simultaneously across the world, unlike in the old, piracy-free days when they would finish their run in the big cities and trundle on to the smaller centres. “There have been clashes in the past – I remember that Dil and Ghayal came out on the same day [in 1990], so if the films are different, it really doesn’t matter,” Mirani said.

A new factor influencing the release calendar is the secularisation of religious holidays, Mirani observed. “Earlier, you had films that were designed for festive weekends, so Muslim socials came at the time of Id, while Hindu mythologicals opened during Diwali,” he said. These festivals have now become secular bank holidays that are especially lucrative for the movie trade.

However, it’s not enough to have a copy of the government list of gazetted holidays for films to succeed – it’s far more important to scare away the competition by announcing a release date well in advance and ensuring that a movie is completed on schedule. The higher the costs, the greater the hunger for instant profits. Hence the recent adoption of the Hollywood-style practice of grabbing as many screens as possible, hiking up ticket rates for the opening weekend, and raking in the money between Friday and Sunday before negative reviews and indifferent word- of-mouth catch up. The best way to ensure maximum business is to try to ensure that nothing else is releasing that weekend. Movies such as Ek Tha Tiger, Krrish 3, Dhoom: 3 and Kick have all flown in solo, without even a Hollywood release for company.

But there have also been slugfests, such as Lagaan and Gadar in 2001, Om Shanti Om and Saawariya in 2007, and Jab Tak Hai Jaan and Son of Sardaar in 2012. However, the latest contest isn’t quite in the same league, since Bang Bang! and Haider are fighting from separate corners – they differ in scale, theme and intent. The first is a mass entertainer, packed with action sequences, exotic locations and elaborately choreographed songs, and rumoured to have cost Rs 150 crore. Its director has a healthy track record at the box office, as do its A-list leads, Hrithik Roshan and Katrina Kaif.

Serious drama

The second is a Rs 22-crore political drama about Kashmir’s troubles, with mournful song and a tragic narrative track. Its director has had far better luck with critics than with audiences, and its leading man, who plays the Shakespearean anti-hero, is a similarly down-on-his-luck Shahid Kapoor.

While Bang Bang! is expected to be the top choice for the start of the weekend, Haider’s backers are content to wait for Bhardwaj loyalists, fans of serious cinematic subjects, and fence-sitters swayed by the buzz to come their way once their bigger rival has been ingested and forgotten. “This is a supply and demand situation, but if a movie is good, it will pick up,” said RV Vidhani, president of the Cinema and Exhibitors Association of India. “The potential is huge because of the five-day weekend, but there is no doubt that Bang Bang!’s capacity has been affected.”

Multiplexes will address the situation through their programming – by putting Bang Bang! in larger halls and placing Haider in the smaller ones. “There won’t be a long weekend like this for a while, so we are expecting good business from both the films,” said Raj Kumar Mehrotra, general manager of the two-screen Delite cinemas in Delhi. Bang Bang! will be shown at the cinema’s 980-seater, while Haider has been slotted for the 150-seater. “There are multiplexes in the country with at least four-five screens that need content, and these films are of different genres and appeal to different tastes,” Mehrotra said.

The contest for the long and lucrative weekend isn’t between just these two films. A bunch of productions in several other languages is also opening on the same day in the country’s estimated 13,000 cinemas. They include cinematographer Ravi K Chandran’s Tamil-language debut Yaan, Telugu melodrama Govindudu Andarivadele, the Marathi comedy Sanngto Aika, and the Bengali action flick Joddha. These films will get the best showcasing in the states in which the languages are spoken.

High stakes

The crowded release calendar suggests that there can be room for more than one or two films in a week – and variety can actually help proprietors of multi-screen cinemas, suggested Akshaye Rathi, whose companies operate and programme films for several single-screen cinemas in Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh. “I used to be against clashes of films with high stakes, but the fact is that there are only a few such slots in the year, and there is always scope for two big films to co-exist,” he said.

The next money-spinning period for the movie trade is Diwali, during which Happy New Year, starring Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone, is expected to be the solo release. “This is a good thing for anybody owning chains,” Rathi said. “A small town might have three cinemas, and at best, you can fill up two of them with one of the two films. The idea is that is practically every single screen across the country will have something to play.”

Vishal Bhardwaj's film won't have it easy, warned a senior programming executive from PVR Cinemas who is not authorised to talk to the media. “Haider will be squeezed, especially in single-screen cinemas that don’t have bargaining power and cannot refuse Bang Bang!’s release terms,” this person said.

Haider has a ready excuse if it is unable to bewitch audiences – it didn’t get the shows it deserved. Bang Bang! has no such face-saver. It will have to lure in enormous crowds and pull in as much profit as is possible before the long weekend is over. This is the only window in the year for such an expensive movie to recover its investment. Bang Bang!  won’t get to hog the view, but it does have the best seat in the house.