Free Ice Cream in Cinema theatres to woo the audiences

Gone are the days when long, serpentine queues of eager cine-goers were witnessed outside cinema halls. The present day trend appears to be that if a film does well at the box-office on the trot for 3-4 weeks, it should be regarded as a ‘super-hit’ film. Scenes of anxious counter-operators at movie halls waiting for movie-goers to come and purchase tickets have become the order of the day.

  The video piracy and the unlimited access to Internet where many blog sites offer ‘free download’ of even newly-released films have hit the producers and cinema halls very badly indeed. The night shows getting cancelled in many cinema halls due to want of even ‘minimum’ number of fans is also increasingly becoming a regular and disturbing feature.

Situation has reached a stage where even the matinee shows don’t manage to attract the audience’s interest and are cancelled in certain halls in the State. This has happened not in the case of a low-budget film but to a mega-budget dubbed film. The film in question is ‘Maaveeran’ and the cancellation of the matinee show occurred in Trichy.

The film, the dubbed version of the Telugu super-hit ‘Magadheera’ starring megastar Chiranjeevi’s son Ram Charan Teja and Kajal Aggarwal in the lead, was released in 3 halls in Trichy recently. Despite the film’s grandeur, titillating music and a novel script, for some reasons, the Tamil audience didn’t seem to like the film which worried the theatre-owners.

In an apparent effort to bring the audience to the theatre to watch the film, the Anbu Cinema Hall in Lalgudi has put up an announcement that those who would be coming to watch the film would be given a cup of ice-cream free-of-cost. The announcement, which appears in the film’s poster, says that if ice-creams run out of stock, the viewers would at least be given a pop-corn packet!