Stars take the hit after films flopped

It’s official. With film producers pressing for a reduction in their movie’s budgets, many leading actors have taken a cut in their fees. In fact, the cut in salaries has percolated down to all levels including directors, technicians and even extras.

Shailendra Singh, managing director of Percept Pictures, says, “The fees of stars had reached unprecedented levels. In some cases, even 90% of a film’s budget went into paying the stars. We have been lobbying and pressing for a correction for a long time. So now I am glad that it is happening finally. The stars are finally getting to learn that a fee cut is the only option left for everybody to survive in this volatile market.”

Confirming the development, a senior official at IDBI Bank says, “The film fund size was Rs500 crore (last year) and we had increased it to Rs1,000 crore (for this financial year). Again, we are thinking of reducing it to the original size (Rs500 crore) as film budgets have shrunk. This is because around 80 per cent of the cost of making a movie is acting fees. We are hearing that these have come down to reasonable levels now.” IDBI is one of thebanks in India that maintains a substantial corpus of funds to be invested in Bollywood.

Producer Vipul Shah says, “Some corporations in their bid to nudge out the independent producers had made obscene payments to a few stars. The stars were obviously happy to take the money home. Now, after most of their films have flopped, they have been left with no other option but to reduce their fees drastically. I know this for a fact that Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan and Ajay Devgn have dropped their prices by several notches to help producers.”

During the course of an earlier interview, Salman had said, “I am always there for my friends. If I think that me doing something will help them then I am willing to go that extra mile. I always try to accommodate a request and I will not charge exorbitant prices ever.” Salman was speaking before his last film Veer’s release.