Fighter Sinks, Hanu Man Continues To Make History

With the sinking fortunes of Fighter, their lavishly budgeted desi Top Gun turning into a Flop Gun, Viacom 18 is licking its wounds.

The beleaguered production house tries to put up a brave front, putting out preposterously optimistic statements about how well the film is doing in some affluent corners of the world where the population apparently flies to work every morning.

We poor Indians just couldn’t grasp the aesthetics of those aerial shots in Fighter because we crawl when we are asked to walk, flying being a dream.

A source close to Shah Rukh Khan says, “See, Pathaan worked big time with Shah Rukh Khan. The same budget, same director, same level of sophistication for the stunts didn’t work for Fighter with Hrithik Roshan. Siddharth Anand admits he should have listened to Hrithik’s advice. Doesn’t this mean he listened to Shah Rukh in Fighter? Given the grim reality of A-listers not working their magic at the box office and the director’s confession that he should have listened to his leading man, it seems the era of leading men directing the director is upon us.”

It is widely believed many of the A-list actors these days actively tell the director how to do their job on the sets, changing dialogues, scenes, and even camera angles.

Significantly, Hrithik’s previous film with Siddharth Anand, Bang Bang, was also an underperformer at the box office.

Is this a sign of the diminishing power of the director on the sets? Not necessarily.

Hanu Man, which is totally a director’s work, is a 32-crore budgeted film that has already crossed Rs 280 crores at the box office. Viacom 18’s only hit in recent times, OMG2, featured Pankaj Tripathi in the lead role.