Last year there was a facility to increase ticket prices (up to twice the usual pricing) in the first 2-weeks of movie screening for the big budget films, which was introduced through a GO by the Government of AP. It is known that recently the GO facilitating this has been abolished, following a request from a group of small producers.
The small producers expressed their happiness over this decision, while the big producers have different opinions on this.
In context with this President of producer's council, Tammareddy Bharadwaja said, "Last year the government has passed a GO, facilitating the collection of a higher price on the tickets during the first 2-weeks of screening. This immensely played a part in increasing the collections for big-budget films, and consequently the small-budget movies was unable to obtain enough theatres to screen their films. Because of this the government has abolished the GO, however it did not reap the required benefits for the producers of small budget films."
It will be useful if along with this, VAT, Entertainment Tax and Theatre rents are reduced. We are shortly planning to take this issue to the notice of the government.
"To resolve the theatres problem, the Producers Council will meet with Distributors Associations and finalize a decision. Presently, the reason behind this issue is, movie makers are not harvesting meticulous efforts to make films of good quality in a limited budget. A film of good caliber, irrespective of being a small or big budget film will surely be hit the box office. The producers and directors should hereafter move forward in this direction." Concluded the producer. Producer TVD Prasad also participated in this event.