For the Bollywood fans, PR is not foreign for us. While the word usually has a negative connotation, but someone like Karan Johar believes that it actually turns out positive and useful in the end for the brand even if its a bad PR. A bad PR means that the someone/something is getting negative reactions and opinions from the netizens.
Karan was talking to Curly Tales’s Kamiya Jani when he opined about his views on the PR Disaster even if its a bad one.
“PR disasters always end up being profitable, so you should never try to avert one. It means that you’re being talked about, and indifference is the worst thing. No PR disaster is a real disaster — it actually all adds up.”
– Karan Johar in conversation with Kamiya Jani
Is Bad PR Really really turns out profitable for the product in the end?
Over the years, we have seen several examples of how the hype got created regarding a particular film due to negative PR but the film didn’t succeeded. Case in point, Deepika Padukone’s Chhapaak movie.
While the film storyline had a noble intention of creating empathy towards acid attack survivors, the negative PR due to Padukone’s JNU visit to show solidarity to students caused more damage than what the film could have suffered without it.
Another example of bad PR leading to a film’s downfall in Bollywood is Laal Singh Chaddha (2022) starring Aamir Khan. Thing is that before the film’s release, old statements of Aamir Khan that he feels unsafe in India resurfaced and became viral to the extent that people actually ran trends about boycotting the movie. Aamir Khan even had to make a plea to the people to not boycott his film.
There are also examples of how PR Disaster have actually helped the films like “The Kashmir Files” and “The Kerala Story”. Both films were massively criticized for their content but the negative PR created more hype for the films and lured people into the theaters. This may not have happened without a PR, Good or Bad!