Most of the people presume and sympathize with the exhibitor that the running of movie halls is becoming increasingly difficult. To some extents, it's true. What's more painful is the exhibition of star movies in their theater.

If any top star's movie is releasing in his theater, the exhibitor lands up raking 100% more revenue than what he gets officially. Do you know how it is? Selling the black tickets does the trick. The theater staff in most of the theaters sells 70% of the tickets for the upper classes at an exorbitant rate in black market.

When one of us went to the theater owner and questioned why he is doing this, the real fact has come out. He says that the extra amount he gets by selling black tickets would be reinvested to make the movie run to reach the land mark (be it 50 days, 100 days or 175 days).

But why should he make the movie run for 100 days? The exhibitor has a commitment to run the movie for 100 days as to get the future movies and the good will of the star. The movie cannot attract good number of audience after 50 days of run and most of the time that movie would be running on deficit. One of the reasons for this is the number of centers and theaters major film gets released.

In case of Hyderabad, all the major movies are released in approximately 20 theaters. In the first four weeks, 80% of the regular moviegoers would be watching the film. Once the movie passes 50-days-mark, the collections drop to an alarming level.

We had been to the one of the theaters of RTC cross roads recently where a just-released film of a top star is running. When we reached there, the theater staff was selling tickets in black at an exorbitant amount. Since, all the movie lovers were told that the tickets were sold out for a week, only those people who possessed the ticket turned up to the show. When the show has just started, the black marketers opened the official ticket counter of the theater and sold them at the regular prices, as a bunch of tickets remained unsold in the black.

The theater owner is forced to use black-marketing, as the fans later would repeat the scenes that occurred when a youth hero's movie was taken out in Vizag and a top hero was about to be taken from a prestigious theater in Hyderabad.

As the fans and stars contend to increase the 100 days centers of their films, the real losers are none but the genuine movie lovers, who watch a good film without bothering about who the hero is!

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