Jab Tak Hai Jaan vs Son of Sardaar: Who'll take the BO cake?

For all you know Salman Khan might have already stormed this Diwali with as little as a kick-ass _Dabangg 2_ trailer  , but the fight for box-office success this festive season has just started to hot up. The last high octane silver screen fight for Diwali eyeballs happened way back in 2006 with Shah Rukh Khan in Farhan Akhtar’s Don pitted against the other big Khan in Bollwyood - Salman Khan, with Akshay Kumar in tow in Shirish Kunder’s Jaan-E-Mann. There were some minor Diwali release scuffles later on, but nothing that stirred the interest of the media. Sawaariya was in no way a match for Farah Khan’s magnum opus Om Shanti Om in 2007, and mostly, till Ra.One happened,  Shah Rukh Khan has had it easy every Diwali, right from his Kuch Kuch Hota Hai days. [caption id=“attachment_522911” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  A still from Jab Tak Hai Jaan.[/caption] This Diwali is different. After what seems like a long, long time, there seems to be a contest of sorts for big screen space on Diwali. Ajay Devgn, or like the actor likes to put it, his production house, has locked horns with Yash Raj Films for screen space for their films releasing this Diwali. Devgn alleges that YRF cracked an unfair deal with multiplexes due to which they were given more screens for Jab Tak Hai Jaan while Son of Saardar was left out in the cold. However, an ever on-alert media seems to have read quite a bit into the fight which both actors have dismissed as ’nothing personal’. An Open magazine article suggests that the present ‘fight’, might be the first obvious spill-out of a long-standing cold war between Shah Rukh Khan and Ajay Devgn. ‘Is there a bigger, personal war being fought here?’ reporter Shalini Ray, asks in the beginning of the article which digs up the past, right from Ajay Devgn’s Devgan days and SRK’s Baazigar days, reconstructing how Kajol and Shah Rukh made for a super successful screen pair, where as Kajol-Devgn pairings barely rustled up a whisper in the box office. The article suggests how the cold war between Devgn and SRK was evident especially during an episode of Koffee with Karan, where Devgn was the only guest, apart from Shah Rukh Khan, who got a solo interview. The article reports:

“The joke going around was that KJo’s friend Kajol called him up and made sure Ajay was the only guest for the show. If you had seen it, it was apparent that Karan was a bit daunted by Devgn’s reputation of flying off the handle. There were no trademark KJo jibes during the show, and no uncomfortable questions asked. And while Ajay was asked about his views on every other hero and peer, including Salman and Saif, SRK’s name was kept out.”

Whatever be the back story, the news of a possible rivalry always makes Diwali film watching more exciting. While till a couple of years back, a Shah Rukh Khan-Ajay Devgn showdown would hardly be unpredictable, with the recent success of Singham and the Golmaal franchise, Ajay Devgn is as much of a star power to look out for. The Rohit Shetty-Ajay Devgn pairing has successfully established the latter as a star in a space very similar to Salman Khan’s in the industry - a place, which probably Akshay Kumar has been desperately trying to claim back for a while. The space where Bollywood rolls all its cliches - of action, comedy and drama - and churns them out in a fast, gaudy, song-and-dance saturated package. With Son of Sardaar - the possibilities are many. Stock sardar jokes, Bollywood’s favourite Punjabi song-and-dance and from the looks of it, abundant slapstick comedy and larger than life action. Given  the success of the recent spate of Punjab-based flicks, one can say Son of Sardaar definitely has an audience. Whether they can stand one more such film will be decided on Diwali. On the other hand is Jab Tak Hai Jaan, a candyfloss, true to the tradition of a Yash Raj, romance. It packs all the punches any Bollwyood film possibly can - by way of Shah Rukh Khan, Katrina Kaif, AR Rahman and a lot of mollycoddling and lip syncing in foreign locations. Jab Tak Hai Jaan, probably has garnered more than its share of audience given the curiosity around Yash Chopra’s last film. With the media going overboard declaring this the big fight of the season, both films set to rake in the moolah. Which one will be the winner? Watch this space.