You would have to look at the two posters beneath carefully, for the discussion ahead.
Do you see a marked similarity in the two visual styles? Do you find this style very different from the normal bollywood style? I find both the fonts reminiscent of hand painted ‘special signage’. Now hand painted signage has almost vanished from the major cities and metros. Due to cheap printing technology which have reached this places, you can get digital control over the final output, rather than depending on the whims and fancies of the sign painter. And being cheap is not a small deal. But small towns where these printing has just begun to sprung, hand painted signs are still widely seen.Also apart from the hand painted signs, the bling everywhere, with lights and the wannabe glitz. As I have seen subtlety is not a forte of the small emerging towns. Globalization has brought its affects even to these towns with every alternate house having a son or a daughter working for a big IT company in Bangalore. Uncles chat around the milking gwala at the local dairy about how their son has just sent 10 lacs from US. Definitely bling is in.
Another similarity between the two films seem to be newly launched Hero/Heroine. If both these assumptions are correct that would lead to the conclusion that this was intentionally done; so that the producers wanted to target small towners. These small towners might be residing in big cities earning their livelyhoods, but that doesn’t change much.
Does anyone know how to find how much a movie made at the box office in different areas? If these movies (one of them yet to be released) made more money in the smaller towns, then these assumptions will stand true. What do you think about these thoughts pulled out of my non existent hat.
If you are interested in movie posters, check out these posters – Agneepath, Singham and the minimal bollywood posters movement going on here.
I’d say both of these movies have “the big fat Indian wedding” as their central theme around which the scripts are written. And “bling” is almost the second name of Indian weddings. So that’s why there is so much bling in the posters.
You living in Delhi can say that about the bling in indian marriages. What I meant to say in my post was even marriages can be categorised according the the level of bling or the type of bling. Maybe for different cultural classes or economic classes. See this poster for instance… http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/1/1d/Monsoon_Wedding_poster.jpg/220px-Monsoon_Wedding_poster.jpg seeing this a very different person would want to see the movie compared to the two in the post
well what I meant to say was that in case of both these movies you mentioned- the fun, frolic and “the bling” of a wedding makes the character of the movie while in case of monsoon wedding, the movie just happens to be set at a wedding otherwise its a sensitive drama and these things come out rightly in their posters.
To sum it up the content has driven what the posters are and that in turn drives who the target audience is. Not that the posters have been designed keeping in mind who the target audience should be.
so much for a “bling-a-ling-ling”! 🙂
Agree to the points raised in your post. But as Mudit too has put it here, the bling thing is the easiest fare to serve requiring little or no aesthetic sophistication. So it is definitely advertising to a target segment that believes ‘loud and raucous is fun’ ; Bollywood has been serving that over the last few years to the semi urban/urban poor Indians (particularly youth).
The Ad of Monsoon Wedding is targeted to a completely different niche – the uppity, urban class of Indians, and not -so -discerning foreign crowd, who are still in an hangover of Orientalism.
So though the fare is basically same, the packaging and the placing make the product look and feel different; and their box-office yield is also not comparable.
sush, I agree on the point that we all agree on all the details :). Only the difference is the direction of the cause >> effect.
I quote mudit who says, “To sum it up the content has driven what the posters are and that in turn drives who the target audience is.” or content>>posters>>target audience
and I say the target audience is the first in mind, then comes the content and posters come the last. target audience>>content>>posters. off course the random way in which bollywood works, we might never know which of these series of causation is true.
Oh, yes, whether posters or Ads, they most definitely begin with the target audience in mind – it would rarely work if the product is not positioned in its bracket. I guess, the artists doing the film posters rarely get much scope to think out of the box. Talking of posters, there are some wonderful posters associated with Bengali films, particularly of Ray, which you may already know about. I am just sharing a wall post of a friend (da)..decades back..a sample or two that can hold a candle to any of the latest new thoughts on Posters:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=123432807014&set=a.119743497014.112296.647162014&type=3&theater