Hindi
Box office in all languages as Ormax cinematix gets a pan India upgrade
MUMBAI: What’s the buzz across Bharat? Ormax Media may now have the answer in eight languages. India’s go-to media insights firm Ormax Media has given its flagship film tracking tool a blockbuster twist. Ormax Cinematix, long trusted for tracking hindi film pre-release buzz, has just dropped its Pan India version now equipped to track and forecast theatrical releases across eight Indian languages including Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Marathi, Punjabi, and even Hollywood films dubbed for desi fans.
The upgraded tool has been designed specifically for the multi-lingual film juggernauts that dominate India’s box office, think RRR, K.G.F., and Pushpa. These big-ticket releases no longer belong to just one region, and now, neither does Ormax Cinematix.
The Pan India version offers a unified, real-time snapshot of campaign performance and box office projections for films that drop in up to five languages at once. Using weekly polls of 2,000 plus theatre-goers and tracking parameters like Buzz, Reach, and Appeal, it claims 75–85 per cent accuracy on first-day forecast numbers, a stat that may soothe even the most jittery film marketer.
Speaking about the launch of the pan India version Ormax Media head of business development (Theatrical) Sanket Kulkarni said, “With South Indian cinema seeing a significant surge in both scale and theatrical reach over the past few years, the need for a consolidated, data-driven tool that captures audience response across languages and markets has become critical. The Pan India version of Ormax Cinematix is a result of extensive research and data modelling, to ensure accurate language-wise forecasting of the first-day box office of films that release in upto five languages at the same time”.
The tool, which operates on a subscription model, is aimed at helping producers, studios, distributors, and exhibitors decide how best to spread their marketing spends, scale their campaigns, and benchmark success all before a single ticket is sold.
As storytelling becomes more pan-Indian, so does the science behind its success. With this rollout, Ormax is hoping to become the box office’s crystal ball no matter the language, region, or genre.
Hindi
Remembering Gyan Sahay, the lens behind film, television and advertising
From a puppet rabbit selling poppadums to Hindi cinema, he framed it all.
MUMBAI: There are careers, and then there are canvases. Gyan Sahay, the veteran cinematographer, director, and producer who passed away on 10 March 2026 in Mumbai, had one of the latter. Over several decades in the Indian film and television industry, he turned lenses, lights, and the occasional puppet rabbit into something approaching art.
A graduate of the Film and Television Institute of India (FTII) in Pune, Sahay built his reputation as a director of photography across a career that stretched from the early 1970s all the way to the digital age. He was the kind of craftsman who understood that a well-composed shot is not merely a technical achievement but a quiet act of storytelling.
For most Indians of a certain age, however, Sahay will forever be the man behind the rabbit. His direction of the iconic long-running television commercial for Lijjat Papad, featuring its now-legendary puppet bunny, gave the country one of its most cheerfully persistent advertising images. It was the sort of work that sneaks into the national subconscious and takes up permanent residence.
His big-screen credits as cinematographer include Anokhi Pehchan (1972), Pagli (1974), Pas de Deux (1981), and Hum Farishte Nahin (1988). In 1999, he stepped behind a different kind of camera altogether, making his directorial debut with Sar Ankhon Par, a drama that featured Vikas Bhalla and Shruti Ulfat, with a cameo by Shah Rukh Khan for good measure.
On television, Sahay was particularly prized for his command of multi-camera production setups, a skill that made him a go-to technician for large-scale shows and reality programmes. In an industry that has never been especially patient with complexity, he was the calm hand on the rig.
In later life, Sahay turned teacher. He participated regularly in masterclasses and Digi-Talks, often hosted by organisations such as Bharatiya Chitra Sadhna, sharing hard-won wisdom on cinematography, the comedy of timing in a shot, and the sweeping changes brought by the shift from celluloid to digital. He was also said to have been involved in a project concerning a biographical film on Infosys co-founder N.R. Narayana Murthy.
Tributes from the film industry poured in following the news of his passing, with colleagues remembering him as a senior cameraman who served as a rare bridge between two entirely different eras of Indian cinema. That is, perhaps, the finest thing one can say of any craftsman: he kept up, and he brought others along with him.
