When it comes to romanticising famous Bollywood movie dialogues, the majority of the movie dialogues that the generation of the 90s kids would pick up are that of Shah Rukh Khan. Right from the very beginning, he’s had a profound impact on the minds and hearts of everyone and no wonder he’s today the humongous superstar that he is today. While for most of his professional career, we have seen Shah Rukh Khan come up with movies almost every year, this time; it was a tad different, ladies and gentlemen. Post-2014, Shah Rukh Khan had yet to deliver a really ‘clean hit’ at the box office after ‘Happy New Year’. While movies like Raees, Dear Zindagi and Zero started on a positive note at the box office because of the kind of stardom and popularity that he had, eventually, they all fizzed out big time at the movies because of poor quality content. While loyal fans never stopped supporting SRK, critics didn’t shy away from ‘enjoying’ his films left, right and centre. That time in 2018 when ‘Badshah Khan’ decided to take a break from cinema for some time. While ideally, he would have hoped that the gap would be less than a year or two, it ended up being more than two years because of Covid-19 and other factors. The controversy around SRK’s son Aaryan Khan didn’t help the process, as his entire schedule went haywire. Pathaan was initially slated to release for the unversed in 2022, but because of all those complications, it got pushed to 2023, which eventually meant SRK fans had to wait four long years for the same.
For someone we are used to seeing on the big screen every year, it’s a pretty long wait to see him be away for such a long period. Add to that the pressure of making a triumphant return after failures in the recent past could have gotten the better of anyone else. However, Shah Rukh Khan is a different breed indeed when it comes to all this. Once again, the man has proven with ‘Pathaan’ that the essence of ‘comeback’ is always more and ahead of a ‘setback’. When the movie trailer was released, it created havoc for both excellent reasons and ‘not so nice’ grounds. For the longest time, we saw the #BoycottPathaan trend take over Twitter after Deepika Padukone was subject to severe cat-calling and body-shaming for her ‘orange’ monokini in the song ‘Besharam Rang’. Extremists had a problem with all of it, and literally, we saw Twitter filled with allegations where it was being said that the makers and the actors were trying to sell the movie by going ‘vulgar’. While such negative trends happened about the movie every day at a time when the internet should be ideally filled with positive buzz about the film, surprisingly enough, the team of Pathaan refrained from commenting on any of it. They even avoided media interactions and trailer launch events as they perhaps chose to stay entirely silent on the matter to avoid triggering more minds unnecessarily. Add to that, readers, isn’t it always a better option to let your work do the talking and stay silent overall? That has to be the biggest reason why ‘no further damage’ was done to the movie using any ‘damage control’.
Today, the box office numbers are speaking highly about the movie, and the numbers are touching the sky every day. Within just seven days, the film is now on the verge of crossing 300 crores in India, and that’s bonkers stuff. While most of the neutral audience is just happy to see the Hindi film fraternity revive itself with such good numbers, many fans who are ecstatic after the movie’s success can’t stop taunting individuals who started negative propaganda and failed boycott trends against the film. So, the big question is, despite all the month-long negative boycott trends against the film, how did Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan defeat all odds against the Boycott trend and come out with flying colours? Well, according to us, the biggest reason for the same has to be the ‘SRK’ factor itself. Come what may, you can’t take away the love, and consistent affection someone has received for more than 30 years courtesy of hard work and dedicated efforts. Add to that, the longer the wait, the more excitement to flock to cinemas in big numbers and watch your favourite’s big movie. Right folks? The fact that SRK came up with a film after four years is another big reason it managed to defeat all negative trends. It’s okay if the numbers were entirely different had SRK had a release every year till now, barring the Covid-19 period. The third and foremost important thing that eventually helped the movie was their continued and dignified silence throughout all the negativity. At a sensitive time like this, any reaction or words spoken could have resulted in self-sabotage and very smartly, the team of Pathaan chose to keep itself away from the same.
Well, right now, folks, we genuinely feel that keeping aside everything, all we should focus on doing now as movie lovers is celebrating the fact that finally, we have a movie in 2023 that has ended B-Town’s dry spell of 2022 with perfection and how. We can’t be thankful enough to the film for helping revive single-screen cinemas with the big numbers it has managed to do. It’s all about growing together as an ecosystem. If one thing grows, the whole ecosystem grows; if one thing takes a hit, everyone suffers. So, Bollywood cheers to you for starting 2023 with a bang. Let’s hope 2023 is an entirely different year for movies compared to what it was in 2022 for the industry.
We look forward to hope and positivity after taking inspiration from huge Pathaan box office numbers.