You never know which film producer is making a fool of you nowadays. Kabir Singh Bhandari 100 crores. 200 crores. 500 crores. 1000 crores. 10000000 crores.......

Mazaak hai kya? Do you even believe box office numbers nowadays? Cinema halls with four people sitting in it are declared as housefull. Theatre owners getting calls to declare a full house and within 5 minutes their bank accounts are credited with the entire amount of the hall capacity. 

Then there's the manufactured hype. Social media high stars declaring how big a hit their film is: and you realise they're the only ones talking about it. Consultants advising newbies to dance infront of a crowd watching a film in a darkly lit hall to project that he's the 'new star'. For god's sake: they've spent enough on the tickets, broken their FD for the popcorn and cold drink and now they have to participate in a dance reality show too? Have mercy, please. 

The most recent examples were the makers of Ram Charan-Kiara Advani-starrer Game Changer, claiming that it grossed `186 crore worldwide on premiere day. But according to statistics websites Sacnilk and Box Office India, the actual worldwide number was `80 crore. A claim was made that the film had the fourth-highest opening in Indian cinema history. And then Ram Gopal Varma blew their claims to smithereens via his social media posts. “I truly don’t know who’s behind this highly humiliating disgracing insult of undermining the extraordinary achievements of the South thanks to Baahubali, RRR, KGF 2, Kantara, etc. All of their achievements will be now in doubt because of Game Changer claims. I don’t know who’s behind these unbelievably naive lies.”

Then trade analyst Komal Nahta accused the makers of actors Akshay Kumar-Veer Pahariya’s Sky Force of booking out theatres to portray the success of the film, writing that, “The total for 1st week was Rs. 40.50 crore. Of course, the records will show total collections of Rs. 80 crore but that’s because heavy block booking of the unsold tickets was done on each single day of the first week to give the impression that the film was performing extraordinarily at the ticket counters. This was, perhaps, the maximum block bookings anyone had ever done in the history of Bollywood. Proof of this lay in the fact that a housefull or near-housefull scenario on BookMyShow.com coincided with near-empty cinema halls because there was no public to fill the seats which were block-booked.”

When we called Nahta to wish him an advance April Fool’s Day and ask him about this recent phenomenon, this is what he told us. 

“This whole practice of block booking or ‘tearing tickets’ has always existed. But that was in limit. And then Pathaan, Jawan, Rocky Aur Rani Ki Prem Kahaani- these producers indulged, which was a little alarming. But what Sky Force did and what a couple of other films are doing now, that is beyond understanding. It is nonsense that is going on. Any thing that rests on lies cannot last for long. And this is white lies, you're hoodwinking the public. You know they would like us to believe that this is part of promotion expenses. This is not part of promotion expenses. You have bought the tickets and it's not 100 crore, it's actually 20 crore. Nobody knows that. So cheating, lies, fareb, that is not acceptable,” Nahata said.  

Nahta’s latest podcast on YouTube is called Game Changers, and has no relation to the movie named above.