An SRK downer

Shah Rukh Khan, a name in Bollywood that started his career from scratch. But nowadays, he is failing to make a good score at the box office. Especially after Jab Harry Met Sejal, the critics are worried about SRK’s next venture, considering his recent failure in Bollywood. The alarm bells started ringing for the actor three years ago when we he released Happy New Year. It was with this Farah Khan multi-starrer that Shah Rukh Khan had begun to take his die-hard fans for granted, according to some critics. The film had no story with poor acting. Chennai Express may have started the trend, but it was with HNY that SRK began to over-promote his movie to compensate for the lack of substance in the script. It worked to some extent, and the movie managed to gross more than Rs150 crore at the box office. But people were disappointed with the movie, and it couldn’t beat the records of Chennai Express, which remains his highest grossing movie of all time. Then came Dilwale, which went the same way as Happy New Year. That movie just made his fans sad again with yet another poor script. Today’s viewers look for a good script that can be found in movies like Kapoor & Sons. A movie requires more than just superstars to be successful. However, soon after, SRK struck back with Dear Zindagi, a slice-of-life drama, where he had a supporting role to Alia Bhatt. This was followed by Raees, a gangster drama and a love story in JHMS. Each of the films was with directors with whom he has not worked with before, and they gave him something different to try out. However, save for Dear Zindagi, none of the movies managed to make a huge impact at the box office. It’s strange since SRK gave his best performance in recent times in FAN. Raees is the highest-grossing Bollywood movie of 2017, but the profit share is quite low. And in JHMS, SRK returned to the genre of romance as his fans yearned to see him in. But nothing is working for him. Critics are also saying that working with Imtiaz Ali was like a gambling. For some reason, fans in India are not ready to accept different stories like Ae Dil Hain Mushkil or Tamasha. Though SRK is pushing along with his age in movies like Chennai Express and JHMS, experimenting with movies like FAN and trying his image with movies like Raees, it’s high time for him to understand what his fans truly want.