Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub: Cinema is here to stay

Mumbai, Aug 8 

Actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub feels the cinema experience will stay, despite the emergence of digital platforms in India. He adds that the OTT wave will not affect the popularity of the big screen.

With theatres being shut since mid-March 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, Bollywood has released quite a few small to medium-budget films on OTT platforms. Several others are lined up for release over the next months.

“It was bound to happen,” said Zeeshan, about the surge in OTT releases of films, adding: “We adapt to different things slowly, but in this case the lockdown has made it happen a bit faster. People don’t have an option, so they have relied on digital platforms, otherwise we would have got there after a certain point of time.”

He added that digitisation as a culture has also had an impact. “Things are getting digitised, and nowadays people consume most content on their smartphones. But it’s not that the cinema experience is going to end because of this. I feel cinema is here to stay and one art form doesn’t get killed after the entry of another,” the actor said.

Talking about his upcoming project, Zeeshan said: “I am working on a web series and I will plan something else around August-September. I can’t talk about it in detail but I can say that it’s a different genre, which hasn’t been explored here. It’s a bit dark, along with humour and thriller elements. It’s an intense show but there is a lot of situational comedy involved. We are trying to do something different.”

On the Bollywood front, Zeeshan will next be seen in Hansal Mehta’s “Chhalaang”, starring Rajkummar Rao. He also has Anand L. Rai’s “Atrangi Re” coming up. The film stars Akshay Kumar, Sara Ali Khan and Dhanush.