Dibakar Banerjee recently opened up about the state of film industry and said that it is a place where variety cannot exist. He was speaking in the context of the closing down of single screen theatres and how multiplexes have changed the nature of films.

In an interaction with Social Ketchup Binge, Dibakar said, “If you kill single screens, if you make extremely expensive multiplexes in the malls and you are setting yourself up for somebody to walk in into a vacuum because you have made the multiplexes but now the multiplexes are now very expensive to maintain so it has to run to a very different business standard.”

He added, “All kinds of relationships with the multiplexes, with the big studios, the distributors and decide how much time, in the multiplexes, a film would be, basis of its star power, basis its perceived value. These are the kind of problems that I have always faced. What has happened is, after the killing of the single screens, and (building) the multiplex and the (Rs) 100 crore budgets and extremely inflated star fees which weigh down a film in such a way that for it to make money, it has to really go for an all or nothing approach.”

The filmmaker said that it is difficult to make films in the current landscape. “It is not really a place where variety can exist. It is a place where you have to throw in a lot of capital and hog everything else and not let anything else survive because the money you give that leeway, you will sort of disappear,” he said.

Dibakar’s last theatrical release was LSD 2, a sequel to his 2010 crime-thriller of the same name.