In an industry driven by box-office numbers and opening weekend hysteria, few filmmakers would dare to recount the crushing silence of an empty theatre on their debut. But Shekhar Kapur is no ordinary filmmaker, and Masoom was no ordinary film.
Shekhar Kapur recalls eerie silence before Masoom became a hit: “They called it an ‘Article Film’”
In a heartfelt and revealing post, the visionary director took a trip down memory lane, recounting the nerve-wracking release week of his first film, Masoom, and the eerie emptiness that nearly ended his career before it even began.
“They called it an ‘Article Film’,” he writes, recalling how black marketeers dismissed the movie with an almost accusatory tone. The label, meant to imply “artistic” but unprofitable, proved to be damning. “Nobody came,” he admits. On the Friday of release, and the days that followed, the theatres were deserted. “This was the end of my career as a filmmaker… which hadn’t actually started.”
The turning point came midweek. By Wednesday, distributors had started pulling the film from theatres, trying to replace it with something more commercially viable. Then came Thursday. Something changed. “I got a call saying people had started to come in,” Shekhar Kapur writes. By Friday, the houses were full. By Saturday, tickets were being sold in black—the same audience that had initially shunned it now scrambling to get in. The film that was once labelled “unsellable” was suddenly a hit “…and Masoom was declared a hit,” he writes, almost in disbelief even after all these years.
But it’s not just a tale of a comeback or a delayed triumph. It’s a meditation on fate. Kapur returns, again and again, to one haunting question: What happened on Thursday? The moment of mystery, the spark that ignited an audience’s interest, remains unexplained “Did my (or the film’s) destiny just change overnight?” he wonders.
Now, as he gears up to revisit Masoom The Next-Generation, the memory of that uncertain week still lingers. So does the term that almost derailed it all—Article Film. And yet, perhaps it’s that very tag that underscores what made Masoom endure which is a quiet, emotional honesty that defied trends, market logic, and expectations.
More Pages: Masoom Box Office Collection
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