For beginners, Telugu360 tweeted about how Satamanam Bhavati has been doing extremely well in USA in spite of deliberate negative reviews by some portals. Our point was Social Media and word of Mouth are influencing the overseas collections more than any particular website.
A website's ratings becoming irrelevant in USA#SatamanamBhavathi 430K(2.75) crosses ExpressRaja(3) FULL RUN in 4days
SocialMedia,WoM ✌️
— Telugu360 (@Telugu360) January 17, 2017
It appears that these tweets have triggered sense of insecurity for this website, within few hours, they carried an article “Shatamanam Bhavati Distributors in Worry Mode” which became a laughing stock in USA Telugu cinema trade circles. Why would any distributor worry after when their film collects $500K , and breakeven ( $650K+) is a certainty ? And the distributor of this movie is a veteran, who was done some of the biggest movies in USA. Why would they worry for a movie that will breakeven?
The reason for this portal to mud sling on Satamanam Bhavati is to cover-up their low rating of 2.75 for this movie. In spite of their low rating, this movie has already grossed $500K which is much higher than the full run of Sharwanand’s previous Sankranti film Express Raja ($416K). Express Raja was rated 3 by the said portal, published a number of articles that Express Raja is doing extremely well and is a sleeper hit for a mere gross of $400K.
And the portal quietly pushed their agenda in yesterday’s article that “The film didn’t receive much encouraging reviews from the critics who matter.” One would wonder who are the “critics” they are talking about? All major critics that matter such as Hindu, Times of India, New Indian Express and Idlebrain Jeevi and many other websites too had rated this movie 3 and above. The positive talk from critics and audience has reflected in box-office collections in India as well as USA.
These critics are wondering who are those invisible “critics that matter” in this case. A single website or person’s rating is no way can influence of a film’s box office performance. End of the day it is just the opinion of a person. There is no point in living in a delusion that overseas revenues depend on the rating of a website in age of WhatsApp, Facebook and Twitter.
This year the competition among the Sankranti movies is much higher than last year’s – as fans of Chiranjeevi and Balakrishna took as a prestige about their hero’s milestone movies. In spite of this, the third film in the market, Satamanam Bhavati is continuing its good run and is poised to add another $150-200K to its total.
With changed dynamics, such as advanced overseas premiere shows, social media penetration, the self-proclaimed “critics that matter” should understand the fact that they are now one in thousands of opinions. By the time this “critic that matter” publishes their review (around 3PM India time on the release day) , there are dozens of web reviews, few thousands of social media users’ opinions are readily available all over the internet as data points and as influencers.
There are few people out there who still doesn’t understand : Correlation does not imply causation !
