Hyderabad: With success rate going down at the box office and gauging the taste of discerning Telugu movie buffs becoming a tough affair, a bunch of new-age T-town filmmakers have discovered a new route, to crack the success formula. These filmmakers are holding special screening of their soon-to-be-released films to select audience and after taking the latter’s feedback, they are either reshooting or chopping off portions.

Usually, leading T-town filmmakers hold screenings to potential distributors and exhibitors who intend to buy those films, but filmmakers like Syed Rafi, Madhura Sreedhar, Ram Mohan and Bekkam Venugopal are breaking the convention and holding sneak previews to students, IT professionals, businessmen and family members and carrying out corrections to make sure that the films are viewer-friendly before they hit the screens.  

“What’s the point in getting viewers’ feedback post release, since it would be too late and it is like searching for an ointment after burning our fingers. So, as a precautionary measure to cut down risk, I thought of screening to actual viewers in Telangana districts. So, we randomly selected 100 potential viewers from each Telangana district and screened my film,” said producer-director Syed Rafi, who will be releasing the corrected version of his film very soon.

“To my pleasant surprise, the viewers who belonged to different age groups came up with valid suggestions. So I am incorporating them in my film, which has considerably reduced my tension,” he said. Even other filmmakers like Madhura Sreedhar, Ram Mohan and Bekkam Venugopal also tried the method and tasted success. “Earlier, we used to show films to friends in film circle, but their diplomatic opinion didn’t help us.  

So, I began to rely on students’ opinion after the success of ‘Mem Vayasuki Vacham’.  We have realised that youngsters aged between 18 and 24 are loyal audience so I trust their opinion. I am going to select 25 to 30 students from five to six engineering colleges and show my upcoming film ‘Cinema Chupishta Maama’ next week and collect their opinion and edit unwanted footage,” said producer Bekkam Venugopal.