The Diwali holidays and weekend is one of the main period for big box office collections and had traditionally been reserved for Shah Rukh Khan.
But since the performance of his movies is going all askew, no one really bothers about staying away from clashing with one of them anymore. In fact it is now the other way round. Shah Rukh’s movie producers try their best to find a slot where there won’t be too much competition to grab the screens available.
Diwali has therefore this time now seen an entirely different competition. There was the Aamir Khan movie Secret Superstar, which even though it starred him, has as its main lead Zaira Wasim, the teenage actress who had played his daughter in Dangal. The movie is however produced by Aamir and so has his entire muscle and goodwill behind it.
The other movie which also released a day later last week was the Rohit Shetty franchise Golmaal Again. It stars Ajay Devgn in the lead but has a multi-cast with others like Arshad Warsi and Tushar Kapoor. There have been three Golmaals before this and they have all been huge hits. And it is a big budget fare, meaning Shetty and Devgn would also pull no stops to make their movie a success.
Naturally there was going to be bitter competition between Secret Superstar and Golmaal Again. When one of the leading multiplex chains did not give enough screens to Golmaal, its producers threatened to not release the movie there altogether. It was also said that the owner of the multiplex brand was a friend of Aamir and that had something to do with Secret Superstar getting a lot of screens there.
Since Aamir will not charge fees for a movie produced by him, it must actually not have been expensive project and so he should be quite happy even if it does reasonably well. Golmaal, on the other hand, will need to make an enormous amount of money to become a hit and naturally the producers are anxious.
Meanwhile, Secret Superstar got a thumbs-up from all the reviewers who also complimented on Aamir willing to not centre-stage in the movie. Golmaal predictably was panned by critics who accused it of being a dumb masala fare. But the audience will, as always, have the final say. Aamir has often said that whether a movie makes money does not concern him as much as how much the audience liked it. And on that score, they are mostly unanimous about it being a movie that they enjoyed watching.  

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