Veteran Pakistani filmmaker Syed Noor has said that casting TikTok star Jannat Mirza in his 2022 Punjabi film “Tere Bajre Di Rakhi” turned out to be a failure at the box office, as audiences chose to watch her for free on TikTok rather than buy a cinema ticket.

Speaking on a recent television programme, Noor was asked about the growing trend of social media personalities entering the entertainment industry based on their online following rather than acting credentials. He did not hold back.

“It turned out to be a disaster. I mean, people didn’t come to watch it, even though the film was made with a lot of hard work,” he said. “Tere Bajre Di Rakhi was a symbolic film.”

When the host noted that Mirza’s fans simply did not show up to cinemas, Noor said audiences had a simple reason: they could already watch her on TikTok for free.

Noor drew a sharp contrast with Pakistan’s golden era of cinema, when stars carried their own loyal audiences into theatres. “Every actor had their own following, their own audience. People would wait for them — if there was a film of Waheed Murad, they would go watch it; if it was Mohammad Ali’s film, they would go; if it was Nadeem’s film, they would go,” he said.

He argued that no equivalent pull exists today. “Now, actors don’t have that kind of following where people would wait and say, ‘We’ll go watch their film.'”

Noor also lamented the collapse of the older production culture. “The way films were made earlier, with full preparation and effort, that the whole system has also become empty now,” he said, adding that in earlier times, audiences would go to cinemas simply to see what a star like Shamim Ara was wearing on screen.

Tere Bajre Di Rakhi is a 2022 Pakistani Punjabi-language film written and directed by Syed Noor. It stars Saima Noor, Nadeem Baig, Mustafa Qureshi, Iftikhar Thakur and Babar Ali, with Jannat Mirza and Abdullah Khan in the lead roles. The film released on Eid-ul-Fitr 2022.

Jannat Mirza, who hails from Faisalabad, rose to fame as Pakistan’s biggest TikTok personality. Her account currently stands at over 25.6 million followers on the platform. She is the first Pakistani personality to reach this number on any social media platform. Despite her massive digital footprint, her big-screen debut failed to convert that following into cinema admissions.