Post the success of Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone starrer Pathaan, the two big releases of 2023 – Kartik Aaryan’s Shehzada and Akshay Kumar, Emraan Hashmi starrer Selfiee have both tanked at the box office. While Pathaan is inching closer to become the highest earning Hindi film at the domestic box office, Shehzada and Selfie have even failed to garner good numbers on their crucial Monday test. Unlike YRF’s Pathaan, both these films were remade from popular vernacular outings, leading to the all-pertinent question – Should Bollywood stay away from remakes?
Audience has evolved
Girish Johar, Producer & Film Business Expert says that both Selifee and Shehzada not doing well at the box office just proves that the recent trend of remakes which had an upswing has gone down.
“I really feel that the audiences have evolved, especially the Hindi audience because they now have a plethora of global choices on OTT,” says Johar, adding, “They are watching content from all over the globe. So fresh storytelling is the need of the hour.”
According to him, remakes, if told in today’s time, in today’s age and as according to contemporary audience expectations can probably do well. But he warns, “Cut, copy-paste job is not the need of the hour. I really think that we as a fraternity need to pull up our socks, do some more hard work in getting more original stories, at least for the moment.”
Failure of Shehzada, Selfiee not enough reason
Trade analyst Akshaye Rathi however opines that the failure of Shehzada and Selfiee is not enough reason to entirely right off the idea of remakes
“Just before these we had Drishyam 2 which went off to become a mega success, which was also the remake of a Malayalam film. It went on to become one of the biggest hits of Ajay Devgn’s career,” says Rathi, adding, “I really think this is more about how you adapt them, how you treat them and how you scale these films up and make them more cinematic to the demands of the audience when it comes to the task of going to the theatres.”
According to Rathi, if one can do that, one can have successes coming out of both remakes and originals.
“More than anything else, it is about the storytelling style. If you adapt these tales properly, the movies will succeed and the day you go wrong with the treatment, the movies will fail,” he signs off.
