The Corona Second Wave has started subsiding in India. The cases in the country are coming down. India has recorded 1.20 lakh new Covid-19 cases, 3,380 deaths in the last 24 hours. This is the lowest daily COVID spike in the last 58 days. Meanwhile, the film industry is looking to open up very soon. There are reports that filmmakers are ensuring the vaccination for their entire cast and crew so as to resume the shoots.
Maharashtra Government has started the process of Unlock. Starting from Monday, cinema theaters in several districts of the state are allowed to open cinema theaters with 50% occupancy. Sooner or later remaining states will follow as well. If the current pace of the graph falling continues, we may see shootings starting in July and theaters are likely to open at least with 50% occupancy across the country in the month of August.
If that happens, we can conclude that the COVID second wave will last for around four months. If we consider the gains of the OTT platform due to the theaters’ closure, we can conclude that is too little to make an impact. Going by the experiences between January and April this year, filmmakers of various industries are hopeful of faster recovery and so did not go for direct OTT releases. With Maharashtra first opening up, we may see Bollywood rethinking direct OTT releases or Hybrid models like Radhe. The Regional industries like Telugu and Tamil are already not interested much. That said the OTT players are not benefitted much from the COVID second wave.
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