Ranbir Kapoor’s Shamshera hits theatres this week, and there’s a palpable buzz around the film amongst industry experts. This is the actor’s first release in four years after his award-winning performance in Rajkumar Hirani’s Sanju (2018). This time around, the audience will actually get treated to both Kapoor and the realSanju together on screen for the first time. The film’s posters boldly announce an IMAX version, and that’s just one of the things that screams ‘spectacle’ at an increasingly demanding audience that’s asking for more bang for their buck when they’re shelling out over 500 rupees for a movie ticket. The trailer showcases some unbelievable action sequences, music and dances, great CGI and because it’s a period-drama, some good old angrez-bashing. It’s a formula that has seen films like RRR (2022) and KGF (2018, 2022) break all box-office records, not just in the southern parts of India but across the Hindi-speaking belt as well. Is this then the shot in the arm that the Hindi film industry has desperately needed this year?
To put things in perspective, we have had some larger-than-life spectacle films like Samrat Prithviraj (2022) and Bachchan Pandey (2022) that promised a lot but failed to deliver. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh says it all “boils down to content” and how gripping it is. “The scale of a film and its stars are important to attract the audience into a theatre but it's the content that keeps people there. KGF and RRR have taught us that if we make larger-than-life commercial cinema, it has to entertain. Unfortunately, we had started making films for the Bandra-Versova audience and had completely forgotten about those outside of Mumbai. The audience in the Hindi belt was understandably feeling left out. They couldn't even relate to a film like Jug Jugg Jeeyo (2022), which did really well in metros but not beyond.”
So has Bollywood proverbially lost the plot when it comes to churning box-office green? And has the ‘mega masala’ movie now become the bastion of film industries in the South? Perhaps, if one were to believe social media chatter. Pronouncing the demise of Bollywood, though, has become somewhat fashionable over the past few years. Social media trolls have been playing a large role in denouncing an industry whose politics they by-and-large don’t agree with.
“I think it's unfair to say that Bollywood doesn't make big spectacle films that draw the audience in. Films such as Kabir Singh (2019), War (2019) and Sanju have all done exceptionally well at the box office and it wasn’t that long ago,” says Rajender Singh Jyala, Chief Programming Officer, INOX Leisure Ltd. Also, most of these conversations seem to centre around a few large successes that have their roots in the south. What nobody realises is that the industries of the south have had their own fair share of large films tanking as well. “There have been films in the south that haven't done the business [in 2022] that was expected of them, like Ajith's Valimai, Surya's Etharkkum Thunindhavan, Ram Charan's Acharya or Prabhas' Radhe Shyam,” adds Jyala.
It’s not been a string of disasters this year for the Hindi film industry either, with some fairly decent successes like Gangubai Kathiawadi and Bhool Bhulaiyaa 2. While these might not qualify as ‘spectacle’ films, their comparatively lower costs of production also mean fatter bottom-lines. A film that costs ₹ 300 crore to make might rake in ₹R 400 crore at the box office, but is it really that much better than a ₹R 30 crore film that does ₹ 200 crore of business? That, of course, depends on which side of the supply chain you’re sitting on. To theatre owners who are desperately trying to fill seats after a lull in business following the COVID-19 pandemic, the spectacle film is a lifeline that can ensure the longevity of what is slowly being seen as a dying business, particularly in small centres. Modern production houses like Maddock Films and Colour Yellow Productions have found tremendous success with the second model, making films on smaller budgets but focusing on the quality of content rather than scale and packaging. To a producer, the advent of OTT makes this model an even more risk-free one and infinitely more likely to succeed.
What, then, does this translate into for the ‘masala film,’ a term associated with the Hindi film industry for over half a century? In an interview earlier this year, filmmaker and producer Karan Johar said, “If you want big audiences to come into those massive theatres across the country, then you’ve got to think big; you’ve got to think [about] the syntax of commercial mainstream cinema. And you’ve got to do that with certain flamboyance and aplomb that seems organic and real and not forced.” It’s a point of view that increasingly sounds like it’s for a few select producers who can garner those kinds of resources in the first place. Even then, films like these will be hedged against a slew of smaller-budget films from the very same stable; it’s just the smarter thing to do.
What this means is that the chances of success for such films will increase, provided the content lives up to expectations. Fewer big releases will also ensure far longer runs in smaller centres. The pipeline for the rest of this year actually features more spectacle films from Mumbai than the south–Shamshera, followed by Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha and Akshay Kumar’s Raksha Bandhan. The lines of distinction between a Bollywood film and a South Indian film will keep getting blurred, at least as far as this kind of film is concerned. There will only be spectacle films and everything else; and the rules will be different for each.