The Dial Of The Sun King

“Apna time shuru,” says the Raees poster, in a street-savvy, oracular tone. But the real arbiter these days is the weekend box-office collections, and it’s a destiny being written as you read this. So the question is open for the time-being: will this much-­awaited gangsta flick renew his lease on the throne, or will it mark the beginning of the end of his ­prolonged reign at the top? Ever since he hit a purple patch early in his career—with Darr (1993), Baazigar (1993) and, above all, Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995)—there has been no looking back for the 51-year-old Shahrukh Khan. But as Raees, directed by the National Award-winning filmmaker Rahul Dholakia, hits the screen worldwide this week, there’s a real tinge of nervousness.

And with good reason. There are two sensitive points on the graph on which comparisons will be made. One, SRK’s ­recent films have not done business befitting his stature. Last year, Dear ­Zindagi (Rs 68 crore) and Fan (Rs 85 crore) failed to make it to the coveted Rs 100-crore club. And two, the ­phenomenal success of Salman Khan’s Sultan and Aamir Khan’s Dangal means King Khan is expected to match up and deliver a Rs 300-crore blockbuster. Tellingly enough, for SRK, ‘Rs 300 crore’ is a peak that ­remains ­unconquered. And now, he has to aim for it against the current, with another A-lister from B-town, Hrithik Roshan, poised to split the votes with his home production Kaabil, releasing the same day.

That’s why Bollywood is keeping its fingers crossed, waiting with bated breath for the outcome of the film where it matters the most: the cash counters. Expectations are always spectacularly high from a new SRK film anyway. But never in recent years has any movie of his generated as much interest about its fate as Raees. The film comes with favourable pre-release ­reports, but what if it falls short of the mark?

“It’s extremely important for a big star to deliver hit movies consistently. In Shahrukh’s case, this has not been the case in ­recent times,” noted film trade analyst Komal Nahta tells ­Outlook. “He has to deliver a film that becomes a hit big enough to keep everybody associated with it happy—even the distributors and exhibitors, not merely the producers.” Nahta says ’s box-office showing is all the more important because both Salman and Aamir have had two films each that earned over Rs 300 crore in the past couple of years. “Dangal is, in fact, getting closer to the Rs 400-crore mark now.”

Shahrukh’s trajectory has followed a different tangent of late. Dear Zindagi and Fan were both touted as experimental projects, devoid of the trademark SRK tropes, but their modest haul den­ted his reputation. And it became tough to rationalise against the runaway hits of the other two Khans. Dangal, released around Christmas, continues to have a roaring run, inching its way to the Rs 400-crore mark in the domestic circuit to emerge as the ­highest-ever grosser in the history of tinsel town.

Nor was Sultan an exception in Salman’s oeuvre. It only ­underlined his undisputed box-office heft in the wake of ­Bajrangi ­Bhaijan (Rs 320.34 crore). Aamir’s PK, too, had done Rs 339.5 crore. In contrast, no SRK film has crossed the Rs 250-crore barrier yet, his Chennai Express (2013) being his best with a net collection of Rs 226.7 crore.

Could this be ‘his time’ finally? Tough to call, because the simultaneous release of any two star-driven movies inevitably divides the collections and harms the commercial prospects of both. “The clash between Raees and Kaabil is interesting,” says Nahta. “Both Shahrukh and Hrithik are looking for a big hit after failures. Hrithik’s Mohenjo Daro (2016) may have bombed, but Kaabil has got good pre-release reports.”

Film writer Rajiv Vijayakar thinks they would have done well to avert a direct faceoff. “It’s not only about SRK and Hrithik either. Kaabil director Sanjay Gupta’s last two movies have been flops too, while Dholakia is yet to deliver a commercially successful film.” But he feels hits or flops won’t matter much for a star of SRK’s luminance. “If Shahrukh needs a hit at the moment after Fan and Dilwale, he needs it for nobody else but himself,” he says. “He’s among the top six stars whose stature is not going to be ­affected by hits and flops. Had failure affected them, Ajay Devgn’s career would have been finished by now. A hit is always good for any star, including Shahrukh. All he needs to do is select his films carefully.”

It’s also not fair to read the success of Raees against Dangal and Sultan, Vijayakar feels. “During Amitabh Bachchan’s era, so many other heroes, from Dharmendra and Sanjiv Kumar to Vinod Khanna and Rishi Kapoor, coexisted without affecting each other’s box-office standing.” Many in the industry think Raees, Shahrukh’s first hardcore commercial film since Dilwale (2015), is his best bet for that elusive Rs 300-crore mark.

Shahrukh, along with Aamir and Salman, has been part of the triptych that has ruled Bollywood in the post-Bachchan era. And it was Shahrukh who took the lead with hits like DDLJ, Dil Toh Pagal Hai (1997), Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Devdas (2002), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and many more. It’s only in the past five years or so that the King’s throne appeared to wobble because of the ­indifferent performance of movies such as Ra.One, Happy New Year and Dilwale. Last year, even Akshay Kumar delivered Rs 100-crore hits (Airlift/Rs 129 crore, Rustom/Rs 127.42 crore and Houseful 3/Rs 107.7 crore) in quick succession. But SRK didn’t touch even that mark—the low threshold of success for any movie starring a big star these days.

It was actually Aamir who started the Rs 100-crore trend with Ghajini in 2008. Since then, he has scored 200-plus four times—besides Dangal and PK, his Dhoom 3 (2013) and 3 Idiots (2009) collected Rs 280.25 crore and Rs 202 crore respectively. Salman had Kick (Rs 233 crore in 2012) and Prem Ratan Dhan Payo (Rs 207.4 crore, 2016) before Sultan and Bajrangi Bhaijaan in the elite double century club. And his Ek Tha Tiger (Rs 198 crore) fell short by only Rs 2 crore.

Salman, in fact, emerges as the most dependable hit-maker among the trio. He has as many as 10 movies in the total list of 49 films that have collected over Rs 100 crore at the domestic box office so far. ­Besides Dabangg (Rs 145 crore, 2010) and Dabangg 2 (Rs 158 crore, 2012), he had Bodyguard (Rs 142 crore, 2011), Ready (Rs 120 crore, 2011) and Jai Ho (Rs 111 crore, 2014). Of course, Shahrukh has six films in that list—Happy New Year, Chennai Express, Dilwale, Ra.One, Jab Tak Hai Jaan and Don 2, all between 2011 and 2015. But the sum total of the ­money collected by these movies (Rs 921.35 crore) falls far short of the Rs 1,326.75 crore earned by five movies of Aamir (Dangal, PK, Dhoom 3, 3 Idiots and Ghazni) on the same list.

All the same, SRK remains a big draw with a massive and varied fan base—and not just in India or among NRIs, as his peculiarly soft/hard persona enjoys a unique niche among European audiences too. That kind of genuine crossover app­eal isn’t something Aamir or Salman can really boast of. But trade ­experts believe he has not drawn enough on the many-sided potential innate to him, or eked out a filmography that ­exploited the many shades of his ­persona. Unlike Aamir—and even ­Salman to some extent—he has stayed put in his comfort zone too long, according to them. Ideally, he should have ­taken a leaf out of Aamir’s book, who was the first among the trio to realise that it was the script, and not star ­power, that could ­really work at the box office.

Quite early in his career, Aamir is said to have even declined to work in a movie that his father, filmmaker Tahir Hussain, wanted to direct after Tum Mere Ho (1990) without seeing its script. ­Later, he also desisted from working in cousin Mansoor Khan’s Josh (2000) because he did not wish to play another lover boy’s role (eventually essayed by a long-forgotten Chandrachur Singh in the film) and was keen on the part offered to Shahrukh in the film. That Mansoor was the director of his launch vehicle, Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak (1988), apparently made no difference to him.

Not only that, the Dangal star has gone absolutely against the norm in another very interesting way: he has studiously ­avoided working a second time with many directors who gave him hit films. The list includes Ram Gopal Verma (Rangeela/1995), John Matthew Matthen (Sarfarsoh/1999), Rakesh Omprakash Mehra (Rang De Basanti/2006) and A.R. Murugadoss (Ghajini), to name a few. He did repeat Raj Kumar Hirani with PK (after 3 Idiots) and that too was only after he liked its script.

After a string of hit-and-run monsters like Ready, in recent years even Salman has consciously tried to go for interesting scripts: Bajrangi Bhaijan and Sultan came out of that search. SRK, however, has had no such strategy in the selection of his projects. Over the years, he did try to work with accomplished directors. So there have been Mani Ratnam (Dil se/1998), Aziz Mirza (Phir Bhi Dil Hai Hindustani/2000), Santosh Sivan (Asoka/2001), Gowariker (Swades/2004), Amol Palekar (Paheli/2005) and Priyadarshan (Billo/2009). But the commerc­ial failure of these collaborations ­app­­­arently forced him to stay back in the Aditya Chopra-Karan Johar camp which kept offering him their brand of bubble-gum cinema.

In between, an occasional Chak De! India (2007) brought a long-overdue glimpse of what could have been. Normally, SRK has stayed with a deliberate over-­the-topness that bridged the genre gap between action-­comedies like Badshah and the grandiloquent Don, and worked equally well in both. Raees is an ­underworld flick too, but one backed by research and grounded in near-­real events. And in Dholakia, one has a ­director who sur­ely can tell a story, as his small-budget Parzania (2005) showed. But right now, as much as the film’s cinematic merit, everyone’s got their eyes on the number of voters he pulls in.