Sinking Bollywood, inflated star fees

We don’t actually need to look too arduous to search out such a movie. Two weeks again, the shiny interval actioner Shamshera, produced by Yash Raj Movies and headlined by Ranbir Kapoor, crashed dismally on the field workplace. It wasn’t as if it loved a buzzy first weekend after which petered out steadily like so many movies do: The viewers simply didn’t present up from day one. Reviews that the movie needed to be pulled out of screens on the opening day weren’t simply surprising, however virtually unprecedented.

In 2009, the identical producer and star had come collectively to make Rocket Singh: Salesman Of The Yr. Written by Jaideep Sahni and directed by Shimit Amin, each shining stars of the Yash Raj steady, it gave us a salesman who lives and learns life classes in a movie which is sharp and satiric and stunning. It’s Ranbir’s greatest efficiency, and, creatively talking, a burnished feather within the Yash Raj cap. The movie tanked, however it’s one for the ages, making its manner into greatest movie lists yr after yr.

You could possibly argue {that a} field workplace failure is a field workplace failure, however not all motion pictures die unsung. Some stay on in our hearts, no matter what their collections had been, and Rocket Singh is a kind of. Clearly, it was forward of its time, and possibly its sombre end-notes didn’t actually work for viewers weaned on movies that got here with a clear-cut, pre-digested message of their tail. Its failure drove Yash Raj again in the direction of the tropes-and-cliche laden masala motion pictures which, paradoxically sufficient, the viewers had begun turning its again on across the similar time. Shamshera, which cobbles collectively parts from lots of YRF’s personal movies, with Kapoor current in almost each scene and enjoying the double position of father and son, is nothing however stale, regurgitated masala which comes roaring out from beneath its spectacle and scale.

It’s not simply the debacle of Shamshera, a movie that was meant to tug Bollywood out of its present doldrums, that has the movie business reeling. Earlier than this, it was the Akshay Kumar-starrer Samrat Prithviraj, one other YRF movie, which additionally reported empty theatres after the primary week. And one more Kumar-helmed movie, Bachchhan Paandey sank with no hint, earlier this yr.

Simply what’s going on? Whereas a handful of movies from the South, Pushpa: The Rise, RRR, and KGF: Chapter 2, have accomplished nice enterprise everywhere in the nation of their dubbed and subtitled variations, much-anticipated Bollywood movies have fallen by the wayside. There are lots of methods to parse these failures, however amongst the most important bugbears that beset Bollywood is the star payment, which weighs heavy on the movie’s price range. By all accounts, the wage of even the most important stars within the South Indian movie industries is balanced with the remainder of the manufacturing prices, by no means letting it go askew. In Bollywood, it’s the different manner spherical: Good intentions and awful budgets appear to be joined on the hip.

For a few years now, Bollywood has been speaking about how creating nice “content material” is the one technique to go, however for a movie to be mounted with no star appears virtually inconceivable. And that star comes with a fats payment. Talking off the report, considered one of Bollywood’s largest producers had instructed me that an An inventory male star payment (all the time the boys, the feminine stars are nonetheless struggling for pay parity) is sort of half of the movie’s price, which is why so many of those stars have began their very own manufacturing firms, with a view to get their very own payment off the desk. Solely they will afford to rent themselves.

He needn’t have been so circumspect. The scourge of the star payment has all the time been an open secret in an business so closely depending on getting a face to green-light their tasks that nothing else appears to matter, and particularly not an important aspect that may make or break a movie: The writing.

There isn’t a different technique to say it: Bollywood is crashing and burning. The one technique to roll again from this disastrous state of affairs is to institute a number of pressing course corrections. First off, slash that unconscionably excessive star payment, return to the drafting board, and spend all that left-over cash to pay those that can write. If you happen to hearken to those that have been attempting to interrupt into Bollywood with their scripts, you hear dispiriting tales of don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you, and radio silence after. How lengthy will it take for the so-called stars of at the moment who haven’t any technique to justify their charges within the face of a lacking viewers to understand that the true star is the author?

Give me a Rocket Singh over a Shamshera, any day.

shubhra.gupta@expressindia.com