Nadigar Sangam meeting: Will Kollywood stars agree for pay cuts?

After addressing various issues concerning the producers with Digital Service Providers and exhibitors, Vishal, the president of Tamil Nadu Producers' Council and secretary of actors' guild, is now set to address one more serious issue.

Vishal, under the leadership of Nasser, the president of Nadigar Sangam, has organized a meeting Saturday, April 21, with the actors to discuss ways of reducing the production cost to help the producers. Industry insiders say that the major part of the discussion is related to reducing salaries of the actors.

A few producers have often blamed stars of charging exorbitant remunerations and making profits from movies. Actors' argue that the production house shells out money only if they were confident of recovering their investment and nobody was forcing them to pay.

The core issue is lack of transparency in ticket sales.

With the Tamil Nadu government deciding to computerize the entire ticketing process from June 2018, there will be a transparent box office system in place, which will help the producers to pay the stars as per the actors' market value.

Hence, the Saturday's meeting will be crucial for the industry. Simbu, Bharath, Suhasini Manirathnam, Varalaxmi Sarathkumar, Karthi, Arvind Swamy, Arya and many others will take part in the meeting.

Recently, the 48-day strike in Kollywood called by TFPC came to an end after the DSP agreed to slash their current prices for a temporary period.

The producers' guild, theatre owners and DSP held the meeting along with Tamil Nadu information and publicity minister Kadambur Raju.

"We are happy with the outcome of today's meet. The government has assured to pass an order to computerize ticketing system in all theaters across the state from June 1. We have also got a nod for flexible ticket pricing and the rates will be based on the budget of movies. The VPF of D Cinema has been brought down from 9,000 to 5,000 and in the full run, VPF cost has been reduced from 22,000 to 10,000. Another meeting will be held to fix the VPF cost for D Cinema," Vishal, the TFPC president, was quoted as saying by Sify after the meeting.