Rakesh Roshan on Bollywood’s box office slump: A big chunk of the audience cannot relate to the films

Bollywood is going through tough times of late, with many big ticket releases opening to a tepid response at the box office. Filmmaker Rakesh Roshan recently spoke about the ‘slump’ the industry is going through at the moment.

In conversation with Bollywood Hungama, the filmmaker said that he believed filmmakers these days do not focus on making films about subjects that most people wanted to see. He said that filmmakers were helming films that they and their friends were interested in seeing. The subjects they chose only appealed to a very small section of the audience. “A big chunk of the audience cannot relate to it”, he said.

The director went on to talk about how their treatment of songs was another factor that contributed to the lack of popularity in Bollywood films lately. Rakesh said that he believed that songs in films were either ‘going out’ or being reduced to something in the background.

Rakesh believed that songs had the power to turn actors into superstars, saying that when one listened to old Bollywood songs, one would start thinking about their heroes. He examples of the films of Amitabh Bachchan, Rajesh Khanna, Jeetendra, Dev Anand, Sanjeev Kumar, Shammi Kapoor, Raj Kapoor and Shashi Kapoor, among others, where songs used to be an integral part of their movies. But since many new Bollywood films did not feature such songs, it was difficult for actors to achieve a ‘superstar’ status, Rakesh believed. The filmmaker added that the industry should learn from the success of recent hit films like RRR and Pushpa.

The director also believed that Bollywood was drifting away from its roots as well, and their attempts to make ‘modern cinema’ were not resonating with most audiences. Alluding to the success of South films like RRR and Baahubali, Rakesh said that the scale of the films played a huge part in attracting viewers.