Why Ranbir Kapoor’s Shamshera holds the key to the future of Yash Raj Films

There’s a lot riding on Karan Malhotra’s Shamshera , a period action thriller that sees Ranbir Kapoor return to the big screen after four long years. The film reunites Kapoor with Yash Raj Films (YRF) after over a decade (his last outing was 2009’s criminally underseen Rocket Singh: Salesman of The Year). The film’s box-office fate will naturally decide whether Kapoor might be inclined to headline more YRF movies in a bid to make the legacy production house relevant again.

Then there’s the fact that Shamshera also marks the first time Kapoor, last seen in Sanju (2018), essays a double role: as per the trailer, the actor plays both father and son in the film, which chronicles a rousing uprising against the British in pre-independent India. In Bollywood, pulling off a double role continues to be a matter of prestige. There’s no other actor who has been in the pursuit of prestige as dedicatedly as Ranbir Kapoor — the fifth generational scion of the first family of Bollywood — has been in the last couple of years. If Kapoor is able to pull off both his roles with ease, the actor might just be able to transmute his cachet into a star who can rise to any challenge, justifying perhaps his overly long Aamir Khan-eseque absence from the big screens.

Still, if I were to really underline the one crucial thing that Shamshera’s box-office fate will confirm, it’s undoubtedly the future of the YRF period epic. You’d think that the unprecedented debacle of Thugs of Hindostan — the most expensive film made until 2018 — would have forced Aditya Chopra to rethink YRF’s strategy. Except, four years later, we’re back to the same place. It’s clearly a genre that the production house wants to dominate — there’s another period film in the works after Shamshera which will mark the debut of Junaid Khan, the elder son of Aamir Khan. (Ironically, the actor has delivered two of his career’s biggest flops with the production house.)

But Thugs of Hindostan wasn’t an anomaly. YRF has always had a thorny relationship with the period film. That is to say, it’s not a genre that the production house or its roster of directors are inherently fluent in. In its 50-year-long existence, YRF has bankrolled only three period epics (Gunday, Thugs of Hindostan, Samrat Prithviraj) and distributed another two (Mangal Pandey:The Rising and Tubelight). That all of these outings have translated into some of the biggest box-office disasters is proof that even though YRF can afford scale, it really can’t pull off scale.

In that, YRF is habituated to look at the period film as a gimmick — as an excuse to mount lavish spectacles with A-list stars like Ranveer Singh, Akshay Kumar, Aamir Khan, Amitabh Bachchan, Salman Khan, and now Ranbir Kapoor. After all, nothing pulls Indian audiences in hordes to theaters as effectively as the lure of seeing their favorite A-listers in larger-than-life cinematic universes.

But that approach can barely hold muster when the production house seems to be urgently battling an identity crisis. After ending last year on the lukewarm Bunty aur Babli 2, YRF is yet to deliver a hit this year. Its last two films — Jayeshbhai Jordaar and Samrat Prithviraj — count as the year’s biggest disasters, the latter pointing toward a worrying trend about the viability of the period genre.

Made on a massive budget of ₹200 crores, Samrat Prithviraj found itself in the middle of controversy even before its release. Things didn’t exactly look up after the film hit theaters: reports of shows being canceled due to zero occupancy started doing the rounds every other day and the film managed to earn only ₹81 crores after its theatrical run. Given that Samrat Prithviraj was headlined by Akshay Kumar, an actor known for his heavy box-office pull, its poor performance did make many wonder whether the film sounded the death-knell on the fantasy of the YRF period film. It also didn’t help that the genre itself seemed to be staring at an expiry date considering how poorly most period films have fared in the last year itself.

Even though early trade predictions for Shamshera — budgeted at ₹150 crores — seem encouraging (the film is estimated to open at ₹12 crores), it still stands on uncertain ground. And the makers seem to be aware of that — explaining not just the aggressive film promotions but also why YRF has been wary of marketing it as a period epic; instead priming it as an “action thriller”. At this point, Shamshera is battling not only against a post-pandemic attention-deficient audience but also challenging an entire legacy.

Still, it could be the period film to watch out for, simply because of how much it is willing to deviate from the grammar of a modern Hindi period film. By which I mean, the film doesn’t appear to use the genre as a device to stoke communal tension. Or to echo the intolerance of the present in a storyline of the past. That’s a good thing simply because of the dangerous turn that the genre has taken in the hands of creators more than willing to comply with presenting religious propaganda as fact and regressive mentalities as tradition..

If Shamshera works at the box-office, it could rewrite the future of the genre and help YRF save face, building much-needed momentum for Maharaja. But if the film goes the Samrat Prithviraj way, then it will end up confirming what Aditya Chopra seems hesitant to confront — that the struggling YRF is in dire need of reinvention. The question is: Can Ranbir Kapoor be the wild card to YRF’s fortunes? I guess we will know in two days.

Poulomi Das is a film and culture writer, critic, and programmer. Follow more of her writing on  Twitter .

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