STAR POWER DOWN, WHILE ‘UNLIKELY HEROES' SEIZE POWER!

Bollywood is going through a massive upheaval as star power diminishes and ‘unlikely heroes’ hold centre-stage. Sumita Chakraborty delves into this crux of this problem and finds out what is relevant in Bollywood and what’s not!

- Sumita Chakraborty

A few years ago, somebody had rightly said, “Shah Rukh Khan or sex is enough to make a film a huge hit.” Well, we don’t know if sex can be on par with the tremendous hold of star power or not, but it is a proven fact that merely the names of big stars could make a film work, and how, prepandemic days. In fact, when the distributers would hear that Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan or even Ajay Devgn were in the cast of a film, they would grab it immediately… no questions asked.

In fact, before the horrific pandemic unfolded on us poor souls, the Hindi film industry complacently banked on their star power. Nobody really cared about the screenwriter, screenplay or the quality of the film, one thing was assured that if there was a big star in the cast of the film, the film automatically would garner an initial. In fact, even heroines were just added as a beautiful garnish – the films would work only on the names of big heroes. No wonder, star power got its muscles from filmi khandaans which further gave birth to issues like ‘nepotism’ and ‘insiders versus outsiders’.