Rajinikanth, Ajith and Vijay
Superstar Rajinikanth, Ajith Kumar and Thalapathy Vijay.PR Handout

The ad hoc committee, which is looking after the day-to-day activities of the Tamil Nadu Film Producers Council, is contemplating on put an end to the practise of paying fat pay checks to the A-list actors in Kollywood. The nine-member committee is pushing the idea of paying the remunerations to the actors based on the performance of their movies at the box office.

If this rule is successfully implemented in Kollywood, Rajinikanth, Vijay, Ajith Kumar, Suriya and many others will be forced to take pay cut as the producers' shell out 50-60 percent of the film budgets as the heroes' salaries.

Rajinikanth is the highest paid actor in Tamil film industry who is rumoured to be getting around Rs 55-60 crore as remuneration, per film. Likewise, Vijay and Ajith Kumar get big pay checks. The ad hoc committee is coming up with the proposal where the salaries of the actors will be fixed based on the theatrical collections of their last few movies.

"We are even going to install head count cameras (which capture the head shots of the audiences) inside the theatres to curb the practice of theatres selling a few tickets through online and selling the rest over the counter at a different price. This way, we will know the actual opening week and total collections of a star's film," J Satish Kumar, one of the members in the ad-hoc committee told The Times of India.

With the state government mulling the idea of computerising ticket sales across Tamil Nadu, the producers' will have fair idea about the market value of each other. Presently, the actors, reportedly, increase their remuneration after every movie without understanding the ground realities.

In Bollywood, stars, for many years now, are working on the profit-sharing model which is not impacting the producers to much extent if their movies fail at the collection centres.