The Salman Khan Phenomena: Trying to make sense of this senselessness

Understanding the phenomenon of Salman Khan is not as simple as it looks. With each of his movie, he gets bigger and better at making stupidity sell. Recently a single screen theatre had to pre-pone its 11:40am show to 10am as the crowd gathered outside the theatre and created ruckus!

Get Set to get your Brains Kicked...Again

So what is it about Dabangg star that he has become an unstoppable force with no immovable object ahead of him for now?

This phenomenon can be explained by addressing two characteristics of a Salman Khan Movie, so here we go:

     1.      An Event

The movie that revolutionized all the movies

It’s the year 1975; the year of Amitabh Bachchan in India. But in Hollywood things are going little sci-fi. Directors have been able to adopt technology to make their movies look wonderful. Enters a young 28 year old director Steven Spielberg, an acclaimed TV movie director with just one movie in CV. He made a film on Shark attacks called Jaws and released it on June 20, 1975 America-wide. It would change the cinematic space forever in terms of technology, action and business model, especially business model. It was, as some call it, watershed moment in history of motion pictures. It was simultaneously released in four hundred screens (a first for Hollywood; so that negative reviews may not impact it’s gross in any way). The trailers were shown extensively on television for first time and there were merchandise of everything related to sharks. The movie was so terrifying that attendance in beaches of USA fell several folds and attendance in the theatres increased during summer. And thus began the term ‘Summer Blockbuster’. Every film since then vies for being the Summer Blockbuster of the year. Because it’s not just a season anymore, summer was transformed into An Event where several wealthy production houses try to release the number one movie. And citizens of America, who prior to 1970s spent their summer on beaches, now try to catch up with the latest that Hollywood has to offer.

But what has that got to do anything with a Salman Khan movie? The answer is simple: A Salman Khan movie is An Event for citizens of India. Irrespective of negative reviews and rants on print and television by self-acclaimed movie geniuses, he has been able to notch a 100 Crore movie one after another.

The business model is simple: Make Salman invincible. Make a few catchy item songs. A comic but terrifying villain. An actress with lesser acting abilities than Salman so that he may not be overshadowed. One-two catchy dialogues that true Salman fans can post as their status. And make the movie release as widely as humanely possible on Eid/Diwali/Relevant festival.

The movie that started it all

The key ingredient is marketing because Salman has been there for several years and has done much better roles before, but it is after Wanted(2009) that Salman has really took off. The man himself is a marketing genius. He behaves in real life like the role he plays on screen. That’s some dedication to the movie. We will never know how this man really is until someone comes up with a genuine biography on him.

So whenever a Salman Khan movie releases the marketing had already turned it into an unmissable event. Intellectuals can cry all they want, but common people will throng the theatres in hope of entertainment, although senseless entertainment. Because movies don’t need to make sense, they just need to entertain.

Movie	Year	Box Office Collection(in Rs Cr)
Dabangg	2010	141.24
Ready	2011	121.26
Bodyguard	2011	143.06
Ek Tha Tiger	2012	186.25
Dabangg 2	2012	150
Jai Ho	2014	107.71
Kick	2014	173.58 and counting

                      The Salman Khan Filmography since 2010

     2.    Super Common Man

In recent years, the biggest movies in Hollywood have been the ones featuring Super Heroes because that’s how they wanna see themselves. But in India, we have different aspirations. And that makes us fall in love with people with no apparent super power but enough firepower to make villains cry, or so to say that our heroes are more grounded in reality. Salman Khan Movies are one such example. He can be a poor peon in a sarkari daftar, but would still be able to kill thousand corrupt men without losing a sweat.

The biggest selling point is that it can be watched with any member of your family! Not many films nowadays are able to do so as they try to concentrate on one part of the population.

The catchphrases are really catchy and easily make people whistle. That’s the ingredient of a 100 crore movie. Marketing can get people as far as theatre, only the catchy (cringe-worthy to some) dialogues will make people whistle. And our super common man is able to pull that off with an incredible (incredulous for some) entries with ease and swag. Ofcourse it helps if you are doing the same thing in EACH and Every Movie!

           Years from now our kids will ask how could we let 

           these movies become signature movies of our time

Seven 100 crore movies back to back is no mean task.

So there are the two reasons according to me for the amazing phenomenon of Salman Khan Movies! Do share here if you want to add anything!