So far, the year 2018 has belonged to the unconventional hero when it comes to box office success. Yes, there have been movies with the quintessential Bollywood hero saving the day in Race 3 or Baaghi 2, but the number of successful movies with unusual characters as leads in the first half of the year beats the conventional Bollywood fare hands down.
From Alia Bhatt’s Sehmat Khan, a female Indian spy in the 1970’s or Rani Mukherjee’s Naina Mathur, an aspiring teacher with Tourette’s Syndrome or Akshay Kumar’s Lakshmikant Chauhan the social activist who introduced low-cost sanitary napkins, these characters and their journeys captured the audiences’ attention and set the cash registers ringing. Other movies in the list include Amitabh Bachchan and Rishi Kapoor starrer 102 Not Out and of course, the girl gang movie Veere Di Wedding. All of these movies had unconventional leads – whether in terms of the characters’ circumstance, or their stories.
Suniel Wadhwa, independent distributor and box office analyst says, “There is immense potential if the script is right. It’s up to the writer to find ways to make the characters interesting and this is evident from the films like Raazi, 102 Not Out, Padman. These films have a desire to tell the story in unconventional way, with the objective is to reach out no matter even if it’s for a niche audience.”
With the success of these films, experts believe that Bollywood may finally seeing the realisation of a strategy that producers have been advocating for a while now – modestly budgeted content led projects. A lot of these films have broken even at the domestic box office. Raazi, in fact, is the first movie with a female lead to breach the Rs 1 billion mark at the Indian box office.
While the Rs 1 billion mark has been the benchmark movies are usually measured with, it is the cost of the film that actually matters. As a thumb rule, producers get around 50 per cent of the net after-tax collection, with the distributors/exhibitors claiming the other 50 per cent. Studios and production houses are increasingly focussing on the bottom-line and this year, the return on investment for the unconventional releases has been impressive.
It also means that the industry talent is more open to taking risks with offbeat or unusual scripts. “You will always have the masala films and they will always have an audience. What is heartening is that actors like Alia (Bhatt) and Akshay (Kumar) are open to taking up projects that stray from the beaten path in Bollywood,” says one such expert.