There seems to be a realignment of the equation among superstars with the audience. Shah Rukh Khan had pulled himself out of a rough patch recently with the superlative successes of Chennai Express and Happy New Year.
Before that he had had a number of ordinarily successful movies by his standards, like Ra.One and Jab Tak Hain Jaan. Now he seems to have returned back to that bad zone with, first, the tepid response to Dilwale by the box office and now with Fan also doing not well.
Ironically for Shah Rukh, after a long time critics had been very positive about his performance in a double role. In Fan he also plays a man half his age and pulls it off quite well. It was thought that this was his return to quality acting instead of going through the motions of a commercial movie.
But the movie itself — about a superstar and his obsessed lookalike fan who turns against him — was too self-indulgent for the taste of the audience. Also it didn’t have any songs, one of the immutable elements of a Hindi entertainer.
At the same time it didn’t go for a totally real feel that would attract urban multiplex audiences. The movie retained some of the melodramatic elements of mass market movies, leaving it neither here nor there.
With two back-to-back non-performers, Shah Rukh’s next movie Raees has to be a superhit or he is in real danger of slipping out of the pantheon of Khans that rule Bollywood. The other two — Aamir and Salman — are making movies that seem to create new box office records. Aamir doesn’t do too many movies but everyone that comes out creates history of sorts, while Salman is right now the most successful actor in Bollywood.
He has had one bad performing movie in the last five years in Jai Ho but it didn’t make any dent to his appeal. The one thing that Shah Rukh has going for him is his enormous hold on the overseas market. He is the most popular star among Indians settled outside the country.
Many of his movies do bigger business in those markets than in India. But ultimately he will be measured by how much of the local market he retains. He needs to reinvent himself fast to stay in the reckoning.
Sunny notes
Sunny Leone has been having a good run in Bollywood. Her jump to mainstream films has been almost seamless. Except for a brief period when her second movie flopped, she is now a settled entity with her movies regularly hitting the screens. She is now going to come in Shah Rukh Khan’s next release doing an item number. That further reinforces her brand.
But she is also doing one more venture somewhat removed from Bollywood. Sunny has just turned writer coming out with a collection of short stories. It is being launched by a new publishing firm that probably thought that Sunny’s stories would have a readership no matter how it was written.
The stories are said to be mildly erotic and Sunny herself in interviews confesses that this was an entirely new experience given that she had not done any writing before. But she has an astute marketing mind and knows that this will also add to her brand.
Change of character
For a man who comes across as brash and impulsive, Salman Khan does have a few rules when it comes to his screen image. For one, he has never kissed a heroine on screen. And the other is that he does not believe in experimenting too much with characters.
A subset of the second rule is that Salman has never played a negative character in his life. Shah Rukh began his career with roles that had strong negative overtones. Akshay has done it more than once. Aamir is constantly experimenting. Not Salman, who is always an infallible hero in the traditional mould of Bollywood films.
That might be set to change soon. Because he might now be appearing in not one but two movies in a negative role. Both are successful franchises. The first is Race 3, whose earlier two editions have had Saif Ali Khan. Saif is there in this one also and so if Salman does take it up, the other star usually plays the anti-protagonist. In Race, Akshaye Khanna was the bad guy while in Race 2, it was John Abraham.
Dhoom 4 is much bigger because the earlier three Dhooms have all been huge blockbusters. In that Abhishek Bachchan features in all of them as the good guy and he is usually in pursuit of a criminal. John Abraham, Hrithik Roshan and Aamir Khan have played the negative character in Dhoom’s earlier avatars and usually their roles have always been meatier than Abhishek’s. If Salman takes up Dhoom 4, it will be a casting coup. But right now there is no confirmation to whether Salman really will be taking up these two movies.
Influential actress
Priyanka Chopra adds another crest to her new-found avatar as a conqueror of western worlds. She has now been featured in the list of The Top Most Influential People that Time magazine came out with. It is a great honour for a Bollywood actress whose zone of influence is usually limited to domestic audiences and that too in a far lesser measure than male actors. But Priyanka gets the accolade because of how successful she has been abroad.
Besides Quantico, the hit television show, which has her playing the main lead as an FBI investigator, she is also doing the movie version of Baywatch, the cult show of yesteryears. In fact the man who wrote the testimonial on Priyanka in Time was her Baywatch co-actor Dwayne Johnson.
Among other things, he said, “When we connected around the time she started Quantico, we immediately hit it off. She has drive, ambition, self-respect, and she knows there’s no substitute for hard work…It’s an amazing time to watch as she pierces the US market. She has an ability to inspire people to do more and achieve more.”
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DISCONNECT: Shah Rukh Khan’s latest film has not been able to bring in fans in superhit numbers.
