Prabhas, Ram Charan, NTR Jr and now Ajith, Naani and Suriya have come a cropper with their latest releases. Is it their overconfidence and weak scripts that have caused this traffic jam of failures?

It can now be revealed with certainty that Naani’s Telugu Hit: The Third Case has done reasonably well, though not well enough to be stamped as a hit, while Suriya’s Tamil Retro is a complete disaster.

Suriya urgently needs to refurbish his stock of scripts and to stop looking at a pan-India audience. One Pushpa or Baahubali proves nothing. Even Prabhas has not had a pan-India hit after Baahubali. This week all eyes are on first-time producer Samantha Ruth Prabhu’s Shubham, a modestly budgeted horror-comedy with a huge entertainment quotient and a cast of newcomers who are fresh and talented, Shubham is the sort of noiseless achiever which comes along once in a while.

Would Shubham provide a much-needed boost to the Telugu film industry? A prominent leading lady of Telugu cinema tells me, “The so-called superstars of Telugu cinema are laying eggs one after another. It’s time the ladies showed some muscles.”

The Hindi boxoffice is looking brighter, what with T Series scoring a hit with Raid 2, bringing much needed respite to Ajay Devgan’s career. All eyes are now on Dinesh Vijan’s time-warp comedy Bhool Chuk Maaf. Both Rajkummar Rao and producer Vijan have a track-record of success and this haha-thon is bound to find its audience, come what May.