5 reasons why Shamshera turned out to be a Box Office disaster

It seems that Bollywood is finding it hard to learn its lessons. Its below average performance clearly hints that nothing is going in favour of the propaganda films. Those cliché strategies which earlier worked for them are getting thumbs down from the audience. After a long gap of four years, Ranbir Kapoor woke from his cinematic slumber, but it too has drawn flak from the cinephiles. Its pathetic performance within the opening weeks vindicates that Bollywood is on a nosedive. So let’s analyse the five obvious reasons behind the disaster of the Ranbir starrer movie Shamshera at the box office.

Shamshera box office collection: Lull in the first weekend itself  

Ranbir Kapoor is back in action with Shamshera. This is his first movie after ‘Sanju’, the Biopic on Sanjay Dutt. In Shamshera, he is sharing the screen with his reel life character Sanjay Dutt.

This period drama movie, Shamshera, made headlines and controversies, even before its theatrical release. The real life events of Ranbir helped the movie to get the buzz it needed. This buzz soon faded because of the controversial poster demeaning Hindu symbols.

This is also reflected in the opening collection of the movie. Made with a humongous budget of Rs 150 crore, Shamshera failed in drawing audiences to the theatres. The first three days (weekend) Box Office collections of Shamshera hover around just Rs 31 crore.

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On Friday, it managed to do a business of Rs 10.25 crore. On Saturday and Sunday it showed a marginal growth while collecting Rs 10.50 and Rs 11 crores respectively. The film critics and business analysts are predicting a sharp decline on the weekdays. With the new releases lined up in the next weeks it will face a daunting task to even recover its mammoth budget.

Reasons for the failure of Shamsheraat at the box office

The collection statistics of the movie clearly demonstrate that there are high chances of it resulting in an overall disaster for the producer. So, Shamshera is already being called a flop at the box office.

First reason for Shamshera disastrous performance at the box office is its storyline, which fails to engage the audience throughout the duration of the movie. The central plot of the movie appears great on the surface. It shows tribals fighting against the British to attain freedom. However there are many Hinduphobic jabs in it. In the movie the plot portrays the British as righteous people, who were Just and respected religions.

According to the movie plot, the British had no problems with Indians. On the contrary, they have portrayed the upper caste Hindus as the real villain. To make an impact it says, “Dharm se bada koi mukhota nhi hota (There is no bigger masquerade than religion)”. The villain character of Shudd Singh is an open portrayal of Hinduphobia.

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Secondly, this bad script writing and Hinduphobia has resulted in negative word of mouth publicity. It is failing to attain a full house. The storyline seems to be so pathetic to some loyal Bollywood analysts that they have termed it UNBEARABLE. The positive impact of word of mouth publicity was witnessed in the exponential growth of ‘The Kashmir Files’. This failure of Shamshera owes a great credit to negative word of mouth publicity.

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Third, Sanjay Dutt has proved to be a great liability for the movie. His template ‘Sanjay Dutt’ performance in every role (irrespective of the need of the movie) has backfired on the movie. People are fed-up with his template acting and prefer method actors like Pankaj Tripathi or Vijay Situpati.

Fourth, it seems that its aggressive marketing has badly backfired on it. Its average performance looked pathetic to the audience just because of the over hype it created with its blindness marketing strategies. It captured around 5500 theatres across the globe with more than 4000 theatres spread across the nation. It tried to kill the business of other rival films. It seems as if it has fallen for its own trap.

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Fifth, it seems that Yash Raj films and Bollywood haven’t learned from the previous failures of multi star cast. Just like ‘Thugs of Hindustan’ and ‘Sequel of Bunty and Bubbly’ among others, Shamshera relied heavily on the performance of the main star cast. It compromised with the simple screenplay and character development in the movie. The movie lacked impactful performance from the supporting cast.

The back to back flops on the box office should be a wakeup call for the agenda driven Bollywood industry. It has already tanked the image of Hindi film Industry. It must realise that there is an urgent need to course correct as faith of cinema lovers are fast eroding in it. Few more failed movies like this will push it to the border from where there will be very minimal possibility of resurgence for the entertainment industry.

The pie is already being eaten by the multi lingual pan India movies. So it should shun its Hinduphobic and work sincerely on its other shortcomings to stage a remarkable comeback with National award winning movies like Tanhaji or socially relevant one like Sushant starrer Chichhore.

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