Thaindian News

By Joginder Tuteja
It can’t get more ironical than this. When Raksha Mistry and Hasnain Hyderabadwala lifted scripts for their first two films ‘The Killer’ and ‘The Train’, they still took some reasonable opening at the box office. Final run of both small budget films wasn’t very impressive though but still the common factor between the two Emraan Hashmi starrers was ‘universally bad reviews’.
Circa 2009 and the director duo return with their most sensitive, honest and sincere attempt- ‘Jashnn’. Sad but the truth is that the film has taken the lowest opening of their three releases so far. Starring Adhyayan Suman, Anjana Sukhani, Shahana Goswami and Humayun Sayeed in the lead roles, no one expected the film to take a hurricane like opening at the box office. Still, one expected some decent opening for this Mukesh Bhatt production that boasted of some terrific music.
The film opened way below average though and just improved marginally over the weekend. The good news though that is that select segment of audience that has seen the movie has liked it and word of mouth isn’t bad. Nevertheless, it is still a scary situation for the film, as it needs to hold on really well over the weekdays. Coming weekend sees the arrival of ‘Luck’ that should eat up a big chunk of audiences.
So what really went wrong for the film? Why didn’t audiences even step in for the movie, let aside spreading any word of mouth whether positive or negative? Well, there are four major reasons:
Extremely lukewarm promotion. The songs weren’t promoted to the fullest while there were no dialogue promos whatsoever. Frankly, audiences in general didn’t have a clue what the film was all about.
Poor promotion strategy. Unnecessary controversies were created around Mahesh Bhatt directing the film, Adhyayan and Anjana being a couple, ‘on the sets’ tension between the director duo and the cast etc. etc. How could this have bothered the audience by the way?
No star value
Plethora of releases to choose from for the audiences. In weeks to come there are films like ‘Luck’, ‘Love Aaj Kal’ and ‘Kaminey’ lined up for release. It was clearly the case of bad release timing.
Overall, it is not yet celebration time for Bhatts and as the week comes to a close, the picture would become clearer. Since the film has been made on a shoestring budget, the losses, if any, would be minimal. However, the silver lining is that the effort by entire cast of the film as well as the director duo has been noticed in a big way and it can only get better for all of them from hereon! - Sampurn Media