Breaking the Rajini Myth

Here’s why, despite tales of the actor’s cult status in Japan, producers of his latest film Robot will think twice before venturing there.

Robot (Enthiran in Tamil) is a landmark film because it is testing the limits of the Indian film industry’s capacity to absorb capital. Reports citing officials of Sun TV Network, whose Sun Pictures is producing the film, claim that Rs 150 to 200 crore will have been spent on the film by the time its 2,500 prints reach screens across the world in October (it is impossible to independently verify the figures issued by the Indian film industry). If this figure is accurate, an average-sized Indian IPO, which stood at Rs 965 crore in early 2010, can fund just five to six films like Robot. Not bad at all for the Indian film industry. 

Sun TV Network expects to make a 15 per cent profit on the project. Ajay Vidyasagar, COO of Sun TV Network, was quoted as saying, “Rajinikanth has a huge fan following not only in south India, but also in countries like the US, UK, France, Japan and Korea, and we expect the film to do well in these regions” (Business Standard, 25 September). 

Without disputing Rajinikanth’s popularity in East Asia, I would like to submit that if the fate of Robot were to be decided by its Japanese takings, Sun TV Network is in trouble. Not a single Indian film has been released theatrically in Japan since Chandni Chowk to China in 2009. For this reason, Robot’s attempt to break into Japan is not of significance to Rajinikanth alone, but the Indian film industry at large. It is useful to look back at the runaway success of Rajinikanth’s Muthu in Japan before assuming that this is just another distribution territory for the superstar. Or Indian cinema, for that matter. 

Muthu was released in Japan as Muthu: The Dancing Maharaja and went on to become a superhit. The details of Muthu’s distribution and Rajinikanth’s star value are fascinating, and not much is known in India about developments in Japan prior and subsequent to the film’s release. 

Although Kandasamy Bharathan of Kavithalaya, Muthu’s production company, was credited by the Indian press with taking Rajinikanth to Japan, it would be more accurate to say that it was the Japanese distributors who came knocking at Kavithalaya’s doors. In other words, Kavithalaya did not have a Japan strategy to begin with. 

Fumio Furuya a.k.a. Jun Edoki, President of Eden Entertainment Inc, is known in Japanese film circles as the man who introduced Rajinikanth there. He says he chanced upon the film in 1996 while on a trip to Singapore. He was “shocked” by a song, featuring unknown Indian stars and elephants, that was playing on a television set at a video store in Little India. At that point, he knew nothing about Indian cinema, let alone Rajinikanth. He bought the VHS tape of Muthu and went on to watch the film “hundreds of times” between 1996 and 1998, when the film was eventually released theatrically. 

In the intervening period, Edoki grew increasingly fascinated with the film because he thought it showed the India of the Japanese imagination. Like a true fan, he watched the film repeatedly. It did not have subtitles, but he says he understood it fully. But he failed to convince film and video distributors to release Muthu in Japan because they felt it was too risky a proposition. 

He eventually roped in a friend from Japan Cinema Associates to finance the purchase of its distribution rights. He invested a part of the money and also took on the responsibility of promoting the film. The film was subjected to low-key promotion—mostly with the help of flyers, posters, plot synopsis and a theatrical trailer—for eight months before its release in a 250-seat art-house theatre called Cinema Rise. 

The film was indeed a huge success—perhaps the biggest ever in Japan’s art-house (mini-theatre) circuit. It was a packed house at Cinema Rise for seven months. In all, seven prints of the film were exhibited in over 100 screens across Japan. Edoki estimates that the film may have grossed up to 200 million yen (Rs 10 crore) in Japan. 

Film scholar Ashish Rajadhyaksha argues provocatively in his book, Indian Cinema in the Time of Celluloid: From Bollywood to the Emergency (2009): ‘If Bharathan, the producer of Muthu…had been asked why this film proved a hit and no other, or how he suggested Rajinikanth capitalise on this sudden popularity to stabilise an East Asian market for his next film and his future film career, he may have admitted that he had no idea why Muthu did so well in Tokyo or why Rajinikanth’s subsequent films received virtually no release in Japan.’ 

The Rajinikanth fan in me was shocked to learn that Muthu was not promoted as a Rajini film at all in Japan. It was only in the wake of its success that Ranjikanth became famous. The publicity for Muthu was not only centred on the female lead, Meena, but also tended to hide Rajinikanth from view. Indian exotica was the USP of the film. Flyers of the film introduced the cast thus: ‘Starring Superstar Rajinikanth ‘Muthu’, Meena and Elephants!’. 

Dozens of Indian films, mostly Tamil and Hindi but also a couple in Telugu, were released in Japan post-Muthu. Curiously, however, the market for Indian films disappeared almost as soon as it was created by Muthu. No other Indian film released in Japan can be termed a box-office success. Later Rajinikanth starrers, too, did not fare well. Sivaji the Boss was not even released there. Edoki laments, “Muthu is history now. To distribute a new Indian film in Japan, we have to start from scratch again.” To appreciate the extent of the problem, Edoki took me on a tour of the Shibuya area’s outlet of the video rental chain Tsutaya. At the far end of the fifth of the seven floors of this enormous Tokyo store, all of Indian cinema sits on a single shelf right on top. It can be accessed with the help of a stool. 

Japan, with its high ticket prices (comparable to Paris and London, according to a Japanese government report) and steep video rentals (370 yen per day and 650 yen for a week in Tsutaya), is a lucrative market for those who can tap it. Since the 1990s, all major film industries of Asia, with the exception of India, made major plans for accessing this market. 

It is not merely the absence of the Indian film industry’s Japan strategy that is at issue. The Japanese market is the mirror opposite of the Indian film market, where Rajadhyaksha argues cinema has been characterised by high cultural and political visibility, but low economic value. At present, the Japanese market is unlikely to fetch Indian producers more than about $20,000. This is just the kind of low-value-trap scenario that major players of the Indian entertainment industry have been trying to avoid in the past decade or so. Producers who make movies for Rs 150 crore or more are unlikely to ‘look East’ for such modest returns. 

Given the story of Indian cinema in Japan, the odds are that Robot will not be released there in a hurry.

SV Srinivas is the author of Megastar: Chiranjeevi and Telugu Cinema after NT Rama Rao

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SV Srinivas