When superstar Aamir Khan made his comeback on the big screen after four years with 'Laal Singh Chaddha, a Hindi adaptation of Tom Hanks’ film ‘Forrest Gump’, the Industry and his fans were excited. However, the film, which was released on August 11, didn’t live up to the expectation thereby creating shockwaves within Bollywood, an industry that is already struggling to bring back audiences to theatres. The same happened with another Bollywood star Akshay Kumar’s latest film ‘Raksha Bandhan’ released on the same date.
According to reports, The Advait Chandan directorial 'Laal Singh Chaddha' has seen a bigger than expected drop on its second day as the business has gone down by about 35 percent on Friday. There is a drop across the board with the national multiplex chains coming down by around 30 percent and the mass centers seeing a drop as high as 50 percent.
On the other hand, Akshay Kumar's 'Raksha Bandhan' has collected in the range of Rs. 6 to 6.40 crores on Friday, Day 2 which is much below even the conservative expectation of the Hindi film industry. The film has also registered a 25 percent drop from Day 1.
There are various reasons behind this low start, but the most important truth after looking at the fate of these films is that you can't impress moviegoers with mere a star name anymore.
Komal Nahata, a leading trade analyst, says that “Bollywood films are not getting openings only because trailers are not impressive, and people are not working hard on music. “So why will the audience come into cinema,” he told Outlook.
Explaining further he said, “The trailer of 'Laal Singh Chaddha' was not impressive, people didn’t get inspired to watch the films and its music was slow. 'Raksha Bandhan', on the other hand, from its trailer, looked like a dated subject and people now don’t go by star names, they go by the trailer and the music and that is why all the films are suffering at the box office.”
Movie critic, and leading trade analyst Taran Adarsh believes that 2022 is the year of correction.
“This year has not been too good for big stars including Ranveer Singh in 'Jayeshbhai Jordaar' to Akshay Kumar in three movies, - 'Bachchan Pandey', 'Samrat Prithviraj' and now 'Raksha Bandhan', Aamir Khan of course, and then John Abraham in 'Attack' and 'Ek Villain Returns', Ajay Devgn in 'Runway 34' and Ranbir Kapoor in ‘Shamshera’ so you know a lot of actors has not had really good movies this year,” he told Outlook.
“All these films are pre-pandemic films, which were planned and of course, there were two years of the pandemic so everything came to stop and now they are released. However, there were a lot of films which would have failed even during pre-pandemic times but having said that lot in 23 should be better,” he added.
Adarsh says that content speaks for itself and because people were watching a lot of stuff during the pandemic for instance International films, non-Hindi content including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Marathi, and Gujarati that they don’t want to compromise with content now.
“So if you don't give them content, it will backfire irrespective of the star,” he sums up.