How Kartik Aaryan beat Tom Cruise at the Indian box-office

As the new Kartik Aaryan hit _Bhool Bhulaiya 2(_BB2) sails into the 100-crore club this week, the wacky horror-comedy’s glorious triumph at a time when prestigious products are perishing like sandcastles, comes with some sobering news for Tom Cruise, said to be the biggest movie star alive.

Tom Cruise ’s new much-awaited release  Top Gun: Maverick  has underperformed in India, in spite of a spiffy cast and some seductive aerial stunts. I guess we Indians expected more from Cruise. The manager of a theatre in a leading multiplex chain who is not authorized to speak to the media shares, “Kartik Aaryan’s  Bhool Bhulaiya 2 has done much better business in India in the second week than Tom Cruise’s Top Gun in the first week. This doesn’t mean that Cruise has lost his worldwide hold. Mission Impossible will smash all records.  It’s just that the Top Gun sequel has come thirty-six years after the Top Gun film. Audiences who swooned over the first film are now   60-plus. Today’s audience was not even born when Top Gun turned Tom Cruise into a global phenomenon.”

Interestingly BB 2, too, is a late bloomer. The first Bhool Bhulaiya film came 15 years ago. Director Anees Bazmi  has a very simple explanation for why the sequel has worked although it comes so late. “See, we haven’t cashed in on the nostalgia factor at all. Yes, some of the characters are the same. And the theme song, we’ve kept. But otherwise, this is Bhool Bhulaiya for a completely new generation.”

This explains why Kartik Aaryan and not Akshay Kumar played the goofy ghostbuster in the sequel. The third film in the franchise would be shot sooner, in 2023, rather than later and would star Kartik Aaryan again. Just what went wrong with Top Gun in India? It’s the same problem that toppled Kabir Khan’s 83 from its intended summit also did Top Gun in: lack of viewer connectivity. The generations that cheered for Kapil Dev in the 1983 World Cup are far removed from today’s audience. The average 20-something audience today cares a hoot about what India achieved at the World Cup in 1983.

It’s a whole new generation now. The generation that cheered Kapil Dev at the World Cup and Tom Cruise in Top Gun is no longer the core audience that makes or unmakes a film. Top Gun: Maverick doesn’t work even as nostalgia. It tries too hard to be ‘cool’ when it has already left the cool school far behind.

Subhash K Jha is a Patna-based film critic who has been writing about Bollywood for long enough to know the industry inside out. He tweets at @SubhashK_Jha.

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