IRON MAN
800 CRORES IN FOUR DAYS

This Paramount and Marvel produced, Jon Favreau-directed,  Robert Downey, Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow and Jeff Bridges starrer has grossed more than Rs. 800 crores worldwide within four days of its release.  It has recovered its cost and is on the way to becoming one of the biggest blockbusters in the history of cinema. Will it sustain its box office magic beyond the weekend? I don’t think so. It has already lost its steam in markets like India.

As a film, Iron Man is one of the most predictable and unimaginative of super hero stories conceived by American ideators.  It relies entirely on the star aura and appeal of Robert Downey Jr. and his public image of a wayward genius to generate and sustain the viewer’s interest in the film. Its funny moments fail to tickle, and the CG effects are typical, uninspiring, and routine computer wizardry with nothing magical on offer.  Even the punch lines are reminiscent of 007 one-liners, corny but not as intelligent.

The much-acclaimed American storytelling prowess is in its death throes. The commercial success of Iron Man represents the unalloyed triumph of the marketing kids at Paramount and Marvel who deserve kudos for creating a great cinematic franchise of one more comic book hero, which can be milked and monetized forever as usual by developing a dedicated audience of moronic techno-thriller junkies around it.

It should be good news for Indian ideators. If a bad tale like Iron Man can do so well commercially, Shankar’s Anniyan (Aparichit in Hindi) and Shivaji should do even better for their strong concept, content and entertainment value. What we need to learn from Americans is to package our super heroes with a little more technical finesse and build a great global franchise around them by using smart marketing tricks.  We can do it. We just have to widen our horizons. Technology is not a bottleneck any more, your attitude to filmmaking and marketing is. 

Take a pledge. You will not look for story ideas in the films of Hollywood, Hongkong, Taiwan, Korea, France, China, and Japan.  They are not benchmarks of creative excellence any more. You will go by your instincts, seriously search and explore material within your own cultural space, and create mind-boggling visual extravaganzas, rich in intellectual, entertainment, and dramatic content and impact, way ahead of insipid and uninspiring assembly line designer films like Iron Man.

Thinking big should not mean copying Americans. It is a big mistake.  That is what we have been doing all along in every walk of like.  Even the rest of the world is doing it. Americans encourage you to do it.  They make you eat burgers and drink coke. You should have made them eat parathas , motichoor ke laddoos, puran poli, masaaledaar tarkaris, and rosogullas  and drink lassis and thandai. That is how you create a brand of your own.

American studios in India are contracting Indian filmmakers to helm remakes of the blockbusters in their film library. We have heard that Warner Bros. have asked Nikhil Advani to remake Wedding Crashers in Hindi.  It is another smart American move.  These copycat filmmakers, with the additional booster doses of dollars, will do more of what they have been doing all along with greater enthusiasm.

They will now become official fakers of Hollywood flicks and ipso facto will never be able to develop a brand of their own. And what they will earn in the process will probably be less than what Hollywood artistes and technicians earn as residuals. The Americans will have it both ways.

We have lost so many opportunities in the past. For example, Krish could have become a globally popular franchise. It did not. Why? It was a third-rate copy of various super hero themes of Hollywood and no effort was made to build even a long-term domestic franchise of this counterfeit super hero. The limited artistic and business vision of the Roshans was the cause of this obvious failure.

On the contrary, Jackie Chan succeeded in creating a franchise of Kung Fu films and comedies. He is an international brand today. While Chinese Films like Hero, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and Kung Fu Hustle have been counter-inspiring Hollywood, we continue to ape it. Who knows the Roshans and the Chopras internationally apart from the officials of the Malyasian and Swiss tourist boards? Walt Disney is known the world over.

Our comedies are good and we really have smart writers like Neeraj Vora, Sanjay Chhel, Anees Bazmi, Ashwini Dheer, and a whole lot of others in the southern states. They sometimes come up with hilarious and original laugh lines and situations.  However, they lack the guts and the gumption and the perseverance to research a subject to break out and develop their own stories.  Nobody encourages them to do that. They have grown so accustomed to doing copycat jobs by now that they probably can never do anything novel and path breaking.  Unfortunately, Hollywood studios will readily harvest and hire this underrated talent for lowly remake jobs.  

Those who have been singing paeans of the virtues and usefulness of turning Bollywood into a global brand, must realize that it is a pejorative expression, like the way we refer to the cheap Ulhasnagar stuff as ‘Made in USA’. Why don’t people call the Chinese film industry  ‘Sinowood’ or ‘Chinowood’? The Chinese will take it as an offence.  And the world thinks a million times before offending Chinese sensibilities. We smile and feel proud when someone introduces us as guys from Bollywood. What it actually means is ‘meet these f***all filmfakers from India’. 

Let money be the main motive behind the filmmaking enterprise. But why do we have to settle for small change? Aim for big bucks, and instead of building a spurious franchise like Bollywood, compete with the best in the world, with your own world-class ideas, and create true-value properties. It is not as uphill a task as many would like us to believe.

Hollywood ideators have failed.  They offer pre-formatted genre based ideas and scripts, and are entirely guided by the concerns and considerations of the marketing guys in big studios who focus on opening weekend collections of their event films, like unscrupulous shoot and scoot  hustlers. They hoodwink film audiences into filling up cinema halls on the weekends with their saturation media and marketing blitz, spending millions on publicity and advertising.

This is where lies the real opportunity, which can be easily exploited by Indian storytellers. And it can only be done if people at the helm of our production companies make conscious and concerted efforts in this direction by opening up their doors to new ideas and approaches.

RKS