Bollywood Trailers in 2016: Trade, Audience and Our Rating

The theatrical trailer has now become the single biggest deciding factor for the audience. While the decision on whether to watch a film or not, can change post-release if a film falls in the ‘highly recommended’ category (also known as ‘positive word of mouth’), it’s the trailer that generates interest around a film.

We believe that city tours, press conferences, interviews, television appearances.. all combined can create a bit of awareness, especially for smaller lesser known films, but for most big films it makes little or no difference.

The trailer is by far the most important, followed by the first song promo and the music album. One chartbuster song does make a difference, especially at smaller centres.

On this page, we will be dividing the response that a trailer gets into three different categories – Trade Response, Audience Response and Our Rating.

Trade (All India Box Office perspective): 20 people in the trade (exhibitors, distributors, investors, analysts etc) will be contacted and asked to vote for a trailer. It’s random and the same people might not be asked to vote for every film. Their options will be – Poor, Average, Winner. A special status called ‘Unanimous Winner‘ will be given only if the response is unanimous i.e 20 out of 20 people in the trade call it a box office winner. 19 out of 20 isn’t good enough, so at best only 2 or 3 films might get this and it’ll almost always feature a top superstar. This section will be updated 2-3 days after trailer launch.

Audience (restricted to internet audience – average number of votes will be 5,000): Voting options will be – Poor, Average, Good, Outstanding. This section will be updated 2-3 days after trailer launch.

Our rating: Our team will be asked to give their rating for each film, average score will be posted here. Will be rated a day after trailer launch.