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Trade Tutor: Is the Shaktimaan Trilogy a step in the right direction for Bollywood?
Trade Tutor Vishek Chauhan discusses why an India based super hero like Shaktimaan is the need of the hour
A couple of days ago, Sony Pictures announced that it was collaborating with Mukesh Khanna to bring the iconic character of Shaktimaan on the big screen. It was also stated that a top star of Bollywood would play Shaktimaan.
Shaktimaan aired between the years 1997 to 2005 on Doordarshan. It was amazingly popular, Shaktimaan and his alter ego Gangadhar were household names. The series was so popular that many children injured themselves while imitating the Superhero. Shaktimaan memes are even popular to date and people often use it in banters. It is a firmly established brand that Indians love.
Bollywood is clearly stepping towards the Hollywood way of functioning. It is clearly moving away from the star driven model and relying more on IPs to bring in the big bucks. This trend will become stronger and we will see producers invest heavily in developing and acquiring IPs. Stars will be known more for the iconic characters they portray on screen and whenever they will appear as those characters they will unleash havoc on the ticket counters. At the same time they will not shy away from doing niche films too and playing complex human characters.
Bollywood has a handful of IPs that are hugely popular and two Universes’ (Cop Universe and Spy Universe) as of now. It needs to develop more and more of these franchises as, in the future, bulk of the box office heavy lifting will be done by these films.
Among all franchises, Superhero films are the box office juggernauts that Hollywood studios love and fight to acquire. Just to put this into perspective, Disney acquired Marvel for $4bn in 2009 and since then, MCU has clocked close to $25bn at the ticket counters. Bollywood didn’t need these superheroes as our heroes played them as themselves, but as time evolved, stars started breaking their images once too often. Then you need to create these characters and Rakesh Roshan masterfully did it with Krrish. It is an iconic character and the amazing thing about Krrish is that he has no prior reference in books, tv or comics unlike its western counterparts. It’s not really possible to create Super Heroes on celluloid without prior reference points and Bollywood needs to find many to create an ecosystem.
Hence, Shaktimaan is a fabulous step in the right direction as it is already established in audience's memory and you really don’t have to hard sell the character. Sony Pictures has enough experience to do it in the best possible way for optimum results. But Bollywood needs to explore more superheroes locally and develop them for theatrical viewing. Let’s try and list out candidates that can be potentially brought to screen.
Naagraj: Extremely popular comic book and a fantastic character. If the character is developed properly and the film mounted lavishly, this franchise could be a potential goldmine. Films with snakes as the subjects have a very strong history of doing tremendous numbers at the box-office.
Super Commando Dhruv: Another popular comic book character that can be brought onto screen is Super Commando Dhruv. Fans have been asking for a film for ages and it’s about time Bollywood delivered.
Doga: Another iconic and popular character. There was talk long back that Anurag Kashyap had acquired it for a film but nothing has materialized.
All these characters are from Raj Comics and part of the ‘Brahmand Rakshak’ team on the lines of a Universe. The other popular characters are Parmanu, Bhokal, Super Indian etc.
There is a host of comic book super heroes out there locally and we look towards Hollywood for these films. If developed properly, made on lavish scales and marketed aggressively, these local super heroes can definitely give a great fight to their western counterparts at the desi box office. Are producers listening?
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