India to end longest running Bollywood blockbuster

Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge – or DDLJ, which has not stopped running since its release in October 1995 - will be taken off the big screen on Thursday.

An Indian cinema-goer walks past a poster of a screening of the popular Bollywood Hindi movie 'Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge' which stars Shah Rukh Khan and is due to be taken off the big screen on Thursday, February 26, 2015. Indranil Mukherjee/AFP PhotoShow less

NEW DELHI // The Maratha Mandir cinema will end its 1,009-week run of Bollywood blockbuster Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge on Thursday, taking India's longest-running movie off the big screen after nearly 20 years.

Since its release in October 1995, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge — or DDLJ, as the film is known to its fans — has run on at least one of Maratha Mandir's two screens in central Mumbai.

In the last few years of its run, the show was screened once a day during the 11.30AM show.

Watching DDLJ at Maratha Mandir became a part of the quintessential Mumbai experience, ranking alongside a walk along the seaside Marine Drive or eating street food at Chowpatty Beach.

But dwindling crowds and inexpensive ticket prices forced Manoj Desai, the managing director of Maratha Mandir, to take the decision of pulling DDLJ.

"We took the decision on Thursday and announced that that would be the last day [we'd be screening DDLJ]," Mr Desai told The National. "Then, throughout that day, we got around 200 phone calls, with people saying they wanted to watch the movie here one last time."

“So we’ve now decided to extend by a week, to give them that chance,” he said.

Continuing to run DDLJ made little fiscal sense, Mr Desai said. The theatre seats 1,105 people, and for an average showing of the movie, around a hundred seats were occupied, with tickets priced between 15 (Dh0.9) and 20 rupees.

Given the cost of air-conditioning the theatre, as well as the revenue lost from being unable to screen other new releases, Maratha Mandir needed to cut its ties with DDLJ.

But the decision was a hard one, Mr Desai said. “For so many people, watching DDLJ here became a habit, and similarly, it became a habit for us to screen it,” he said.

He recounted how passengers heading to afternoon trains at the nearby Mumbai Central railway station, or to interstate buses at the adjacent bus depot, would arrive early to go to Maratha Mandir, watch DDLJ, and then proceed to leave town.

Vinod Ganesh, a banker who now works in London and who first watched DDLJ on television, remembers watching it for the first time on the big screen at Maratha Mandir in 2001. It was a near-full show then, he said, with three-quarters of the seats full.

The Maratha Mandir cinema was built in 1960, and the first film to be screened there was the lavish historical drama Mughal-e-Azam. That movie ran for eight straight years.

The movie theatre’s interiors are somewhat rundown, with cracked brown faux-leather chairs and red-and-pink striped walls. A vast balcony overhangs the main seating area. It is a far cry from the snazzy multiplexes that have mushroomed across Indian cities since 1995.

“There were auto drivers and taxi drivers and college students all around me,” Mr Ganesh said of the 2001 viewing. “And it was clear that I was the only one who was there for the first time. Everybody else had been there before. They were reciting the dialogues, they were singing along with the songs.”

However, some of the audience, Mr Ganesh admitted, might just have been there for the cheap air-conditioning.

A sentimental love story that runs for more than three hours, DDLJ was one of Bollywood’s biggest-ever hits. Adjusted for current figures, the movie has made roughly 3 billion rupees.

The movie — whose title translates to The Courageous Will Take The Bride — tells the story of Raj and Simran, young Indians who meet on holiday in Switzerland. Through the course of the film, Raj pursues Simran, trying first to woo her and then to win over her parents, who are determined that she marry another man.

The character of Raj was played by Shah Rukh Khan, now Bollywood’s biggest superstar, but then just an actor on the cusp of stardom.

“It’s Shah Rukh Khan’s best movie,” said Chandra Mouli, a 21-year-old university student who lives in Hyderabad but has made the overnight train journey to Mumbai four times in the past year to watch DDLJ at Maratha Mandir.

“It’s inspiring for how it celebrates love, and it teaches you how to flirt with girls,” he said.

Mr Mouli is planning another trip to Mumbai in the coming week, to watch DDLJ at Maratha Mandir one last time in the company of between 200 and 300 people who are all members of a Shah Rukh Khan fan club, the SRK Universe. “It’s very sad news, but everything has to end some time, I suppose,” he said.

Mumbai-based filmmaker Sudhish Kamath, meanwhile, has never attended a DDLJ screening at Maratha Mandir.

“It’s one of those things, which you keep planning but somehow never do,” he said. “In fact, in November, we heard rumours that the film might be pulled, so we thought we should go. We never did.”

It was possible, Mr Kamath said, that the film’s two-decade run had been financed — at least in part — by its producers Yash Raj Films.

“I don’t see how they could have sustained it for 1,000 weeks without some sort of subsidy from the producers,” he added.

Maratha Mandir’s managing director Mr Desai said that he was scheduled to meet Aditya Chopra, the director of DDLJ, on Wednesday.

“Maybe we will organise another extension, depending on how that meeting goes,” he said. “After all, we love the movie too. And we’ve been very proud to run it.”