Beyond Boycott trends and Bollywood naysayers, picture abhi baaki hai

Vikram, RRR and KGF 2 represent movies that the Indian film industry has forgotten how to make. And the audience has latched on to the fact.

I couldn’t sleep a wink the night before the release of Kamal Haasan starrer Vikram. I couldn’t remember when was the last time a movie got me so amped up. I still wonder exactly what aspect of this film made me feel so excited. Yes, of course, Kamal was making a comeback on the big screen after a gap of four years, and I was excited to see what Lokesh Kanagaraj has done with him. The film also packed a lot of star power, Fahadh Faasil and Vijay Sethupathi. During Kamal’s big-screen sabbatical, I watched movies of some of the biggest stars with bigger production value, helmed by superstar directors. Between 2018 and 2021, four Rajinikanth movies came out. None gave me a sleepless night.

Vikram, however, felt like a breath of fresh air. Filmmaker Lokesh Kanagaraj had promised an out-and-out action spectacle with little to no propaganda in his trailer. The film felt like it was purely made by filmmakers for the sake of entertainment as opposed to sending some kind of a message. And everyone, irrespective of their political leanings, could indulge in this film without any guilt, despite Kamal’s reputation as a politician.

Vikram represented the movies that our Indian film industry seems to have forgotten how to make. The audience has also latched on to the fact. They may not be able to put a figure on as to why a film didn’t get their attention and encouraged them to buy a ticket, but they know when something’s off.

Take, for instance, the other two biggest global hits from the south Indian film industry: KGF: Chapter 2 and RRR. Both these films represented the same spirit as Vikram. These directors made these movies purely to entertain the audience. These films offered colourful characters, and larger-than-life heroes and they were ambitious on both scale and scope. They worked because these movies put the audience at the centre.

Bollywood superstar Aamir Khan’s latest movie Laal Singh Chaddha did not appeal to the sensibilities of even some of India’s finest critics and mass audiences alike. I honestly believe a social media campaign #BoycottBollywood has little to do with the film’s commercial outcome. The box office results may have coincidentally reflected the boycott calls from social media, but at the end of the day, a film lives and dies on its own merits. Nobody can take away its glory.

That said, the box office performance of a movie was never an honest and credible parameter to judge it. There are plenty of examples of movies that were celebrated by critics but were dismissed by the audience at the ticket windows. And there were also movies with poor critical ratings that had managed to strike gold at the box office.

Case in point is Kamal’s career. The likes of Guna, Aalavandhan, Anbe Sivam, and Hey Ram didn’t get their due at the box office during their initial release. But, today they are celebrated by a wide audience.

Whatever is going on in the Hindi film industry is nothing new and nobody can take credit for fashioning its slowdown. Growth, decay and evolution are part of the natural cycle and Bollywood is not immune to that. Malayalam cinema today enjoys the reputation of the industry leader when it comes to making sensible movies on a myriad of human emotions. But, it was in a rut from the late 90s to the end of the 2000s. At the beginning of 2010, the industry reinvented itself and 12 years later, it is still riding the new wave with ever-growing passion and charm.

The people always love a good comeback story like the off-duty spy in Vikram. So, it is only a matter of time, before Bollywood could bounce back from the rut and begin a new phase. To quote Om Makhija from Om Shanti Om, “Picture abhi baaki hai mere dost.”