Mumbai, January 30 - The Bollywood film industry is witnessing history being re-written at the box office, thanks to superstar Shah Rukh Khan's "Pathaan" which is simply tearing apart all the box office records. The spy action thriller has just concluded its opening weekend with a worldwide gross collection of approx. 542 crores.
The success of "Pathaan" comes at a time when Bollywood was all over post the covid-19 pandemic. Despite a few box-office successes last year, the Hindi film industry badly needed a big blockbuster to regain its lost glory, and that came in the form of Siddharth Anand's directorial, which is a part of Yash Raj Films' ambitious spy universe. Also starring John Abraham and Deepika Padukone, "Pathaan" is currently the 15th biggest Indian film and will be entered in the top 5.
On the larger picture, more than Bollywood, "Pathaan" marks a king-size comeback of two giant forces of Indian cinema, Shah Rukh Khan and Yash Raj Films. The combo of SRK and YRF has delivered some of the remarkable blockbusters of Indian cinema, but over the last few years, things didn't go the way they would have thought.
Shah Rukh Khan - Before "Pathaan", King Khan's last film in a full-fledged role was "Zero" in 2018. It was an experimental film for the superstar with director Aanand L. Rai. However, the movie turned out to be a big failure which made SRK, whose previous movie "Jab Harry Met Sejal" was also a flop, take a break before planning his next.
In 2020, SRK signed "Pathaan" and it went on floors later in the same year. However, the covid-19 pandemic had some other plans which kept pushing the shoot of the film, and in between, SRK went through a personal crisis in late 2021. After dealing with a tough situation, SRK returned to the set in early 2022 and completed the shoot amid start-stop schedules due to the pandemic.
"Pathaan" has now become SRK's biggest blockbuster and it is the sweetest end to his 4 years of hiatus during which he was writing a whole new book when everyone thought his chapter is over.
Yash Raj Films - If Bollywood is kicking and alive, it is because of the production houses like YRF who didn't surrender at the time when others were taking the easy route to cover their losses. A firm believer in big screen experience, YRF, arguably the biggest production studio in India, is probably the biggest reason behind "Pathaan's" success.
The studio, headed by Aditya Chopra, could have easily gone the other way but he chooses to go with what was most important for Bollywood. YRF had four releases post the pandemic, in the form of "Bunty Aur Babli 2", "Jayeshbhai Jordaar", "Samrat Prithviraj", and "Shamshera", and they all turned out to be disasters at the box office. YRF got lucrative offers from OTT platforms for direct-to-digital releases for the aforementioned, but it reject all of them to give those movies a proper theatrical release.
Yash Raj Films deserve much more praise than it is getting for "Pathaan". Because of such studios, the big screen cinema is breathing.
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