In some cases, the producer may have succeeded in earning a handsome profit by selling his film, but Strade pundits will still term the film as loser/flop/disaster if the distributors don't recover their investment. More importantly, they failed to recover the money that had been invested in making them. These films did not live up to the banners which produced them, the cast which they boasted of and the hype that was generated around them. While films like Sarfarosh, Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain, Daag -The Fire and Sirf Tum, which qualify as universal successes, are not blockbusters.Īt the other extreme are films like Dillagi, Thakshak, Hum Tum Pe Marte Hain, Mast, etc. For those who do not know what C P Berar and C I stand for, the former (Central Province) covers parts of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, while C I (Central India) covers places like Indore, Ratlam, Bhopal, Ujjain - in short, the other parts of Madhya Pradesh.Īll the same, Hum Saath-Saath Hai is the biggest hit of 1999. That is to say, its business in circuits like Bombay, east Punjab, Bihar, C P Berar, C I, Rajasthan and Nizam are strong enough to give it the title of blockbuster, but its collections in Delhi and Bengal don’t merit the coveted title. There was, of course, Hum Saath-Saath Hain, but it has not done the same kind of business all over India. What was also quite unusual was the fact that not a single film could qualify as the universal blockbuster of the year. The following table should help.Īs you can see, the year 1999 has not been any different from the other years of the past decade, except that the films that did not run made losses that were huge enough to be back-breaking. Let's begin this column by taking a look what the Bollywood stars were up to in 1999. Rediff On The NeT, Movies: A look at the year gone by

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