Of mohabbats and machine guns

Usually, movie releases are clubbed along with the flavor of that period, like – summer blockbusters, festival releases etc. February being the month of valentine’s days, typically, romcoms are slotted for this window. Romance and love used to be guaranteed hit themes at the box office that many a leading hero have established their careers based on romcom movies. One Mr. Shahrukh being a glowing case, where he pushed the envelope to such an extent that, he made spoof of his own characters in one of his movies, where he tagged himself as “Mohabbat man”. Most of the leading actors who started their career around his time, tried to repeat his approach with varying levels of success. Some of them branched out to try action genre, which is usually dubbed as the “last resort” genre for a movie hero to pick up, for there is only character artist role if this genre also lets them down. Amitabh is a decent example for this case where he made a name for himself as an angry young man, angry middle-aged man and eventually moved on to play dad and granpa roles. Fact that he is still acting sums up his stamina and audience’s appetite for his movies! Another example of a leading actor who is following this well-trodden path is Mr. SRK himself. After having seen multiple movies of his bomb at the BO, he seems to have realized that he has overspent his “chocolate” hero character, and “Rahul/Raj” are not going to be crowd pullers anymore. So, he literally pulls out the big guns, goes all blazing and guess what, he rakes in the biggest hits of the year in “Jawan” and “Pathan”. Same goes for his illustrious peers as well, almost all of whom are choosing storylines where they can flaunt the latest and meanest of guns, bursting the biggest of bombs and destroying as many bridges as possible and buildings on screen. “Animal” a recent hit of Ranbir Kapoor, had been in news for all the toxicity it flaunts in its theme, misogyny etc. But rarely anyone talks about the murderous rage let lose by the hero on his enemies and the kind of guns he deploys to achieve that purpose. This maddening trend kind of got kick started from Kollywood, If I may say, with Kamal tasting his biggest success at BO, courtesy “Vikram” and “Eagle” that famous machine gun which makes a guest appearance towards the end. While their Hollywood counterparts have dedicated genres for such themes, be it superheroes, romcom genre, action, drama etc, the India market has always been a potpourri of all these genres across every movie released, for our audiences have always been pampered with such a bouquet of genres in a single movie. That is why we are unable to churn a superhero franchise of our own, despite having such rich mythology and culture. Why would you need a superhero when your supposedly regular guy can send henchmen flying across all directions and dimensions, “regular” comic superheroes falter in front of them. With the success of gun culture on screen, having already established that drinking is commonplace in our households, wonder what next is up for future movie audiences.