Paid media stories are harmful for business aspect of films: Kangana

Kangana Ranaut has never been shy of giving bold statements and she proved it again today. She was present at a five star hotel in Mumbai to launch Anupama Chopra's book, The Front Row: Conversations on Cinema.' Before launching the book, Anupama started doing a Q and A session with Kangana, Rajeev Masand and Arunabh Kumar. During this, she asked Kangana about her opinion on the on-going trend of paid media stories.

Kangana promptly replied, "I really don't know what to say. I feel itis very harmful for the business aspect of a film. You spend so much money buying these Media Net stories or full page ads, you can rather save this money and put it in the making or marketing of the film."

She went on to add that these media net stories actually do not benefit the film. If you see, a film like Queen did well only due to a good word of mouth promotion as well as its strong content, rather than any media stories. She also mentioned, "But some people are interested in the buying part of things, they want to buy everything from the movie reviews to the media net to the opinions and so on. It's hard for small film-makers to survive in such situations."

Today the trend of manufactured PR images is also in trend. Commenting on this, Kangana said, "How much ever you think that you don't care about what people think, at the end it actually does matter. When you are in an industry where image is everything, then this means a lot to you. People identify you from the roles that you enact and the brands that you associate with. In this time when everything spreads like wild fire, PR images does matter."

Many celebrities defer to answer such questions, but Kangana took it in her stride and answered them gracefully.

What are your views on these two topics of debate?