The journey to Shah Rukh Khan’s box office scorcher ‘Pathaan’
‘At fifty-five, he had little to lose – and he finally stepped into the shoes of a bona fide action hero.’
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After a superstar has done television, reality shows and films of every kind, shape and size, and of every scale, with every promising film-maker there is in India, ‘What next?’ becomes an uncomfortable yet inevitable question. After three decades of a glorious career, maybe reinvention is the name of the game. And Shah Rukh did just that. He kept giving himself new challenges, pushing himself creatively.
The lover-boy image was slowly dwindling. Romance was no longer a genre that ensured footfalls. It was a natural progression for him to find roles that were out of the box: a complex film about a superstar and his troubled fan in Maneesh Sharma’s Fan, a vagabond in Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal, a gangster in Rahul Dholakia’s Raees and eventually a dwarf in Aanand L. Rai’s ambitious Zero.
There was merit in the choices made, but none of them landed. Zero was arguably the biggest bomb of Shah Rukh’s career. He had never fallen that hard, that low. For the budget it was made on, the film struggled to make respectable box-office numbers.
The film’s failure hurt him on a personal level. It was probably the fact that his peers Salman Khan and Aamir Khan were delivering blockbusters such as Tiger Zinda Hai and Dangal around the same time.
A trade...
