Sudhir Kothari, 36, a financial analyst and adviser based in the southern Indian city of Chennai, has ordered a special five-kilogramme (11-pound) choco-truffle cake, garlands and booked dhol (drum) players. The T-shirts, badges and wristbands that he had ordered arrived in time and Rohini Silver Screens theatre has allowed him to erect a 7.4-metre (25-foot) cutout of Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan for the special 9am “First Day, First Show” of Dunki, Khan’s new film that releases worldwide on Thursday. A diehard “SKRian”, as Khan’s fans call themselves, Kothari told Al Jazeera that in 2013, three to four days after “SRK sir started following me, I turned my personal Twitter account into a fan club.” Today his handle, SRKChennaiFC, has 167,600 followers. Kothari, who prefers the appellation “The Only Fan SRK Follows” to his own name, and has written a book of the same title, was busy until late Wednesday evening overseeing the arrangements at the theatre, booked for SRK fans after submitting a support letter from SRK’s production team. After garlanding and pouring milk over Khan’s cutout, they will light fireworks and dance. Inside the 550-seater theatre, too, they will dance, cut the cake and post videos on their handles with rapturous adjectives and hashtags like #DunkiReview, meant to tickle the interest of prospective ticket buyers. In all likelihood, Khan, who has 43.9 million followers on X and follows 74 people, of whom five are fan accounts, will acknowledge the celebration videos with a sweet thanks and #Dunki. Yash Paryani, the admin of SRK Universe, Khan’s biggest fan club which has 3.2 million followers on Facebook, tweeted that for December 21, fans are organising “1,000+ first day, first shows in 65 countries”. Rishil Jogani, who said he is part of “a small group of admins of Khan’s fan clubs that takes some big decisions”, told Al Jazeera that “these numbers are not 100 percent accurate,” but fans and fan clubs post them because “euphoria is very contagious. There is FOMO [fear of missing out] and it motivates people to book tickets.” All the fans Al Jazeera spoke with said that they “don’t get a penny” or any free tickets, and they do all this out of their love for Khan, hoping for one end result: “For SRK films to do wonders and for him to be happy”. Dunki, unlike Khan’s two multi-star, action-packed hits released earlier this year, is riding mostly on Khan’s shoulders and will test his box-office clout. To prepare for that, he has spent months marketing it in a way that resembles the election campaign style of India’s governing right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, the very party he has had several run-ins with in the past. But it is not clear if all this effort will pay off this time. Hopes for a hat-trick Khan and his fans are hoping Dunki will beat his previous blockbusters [Still from Dunki courtesy: Spice PR] This year has been a very happy one for Khan, 58, who returned to theatre screens after a four-year hiatus, a string of flops and a massive personal setback. His two films — Pathaan, which was released in January this year, and, Jawan [Soldier], in September — were blockbuster hits, and have made it to the top 10 highest-grossing Indian films ever. With Dunki, industry insiders said, Khan is hoping to score a hat-trick. The year of Khan’s last box-office hit, 2015, was also the year when he called out rising religious intolerance in the country, ruffling the feathers of the governing right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). A concerted backlash followed, his films were trolled and threatened with calls for boycott, and it seemed that he had lost his box-office mojo after three flops and two that did middling business. In 2021, during the pandemic, his then-24-year-old son Aryan Khan was arrested, along with seven others, in an alleged drug bust on board a cruise ship off the Mumbai coast. The young Khan was charged with possession, consumption and sale of illegal substances and had to spend about three weeks in jail. Seven months later, all the charges were dropped. Khan has always been outspoken and does not scare easily. He once reportedly told off a Mumbai mafia boss who was pressuring him to act in a film, “Shoot me if you want to, but I won’t work for you. I am a Pathaan,” referring to the proud, warrior clan that he is a descendent of. His public appearances always sparkled with his signature repartee. Well-read and sharp, he gave candid interviews and would appear regularly on reality and comedy TV shows, especially while promoting his films. But after his son was arrested and attempts were allegedly made to extort money from Khan, he went quiet and retreated from public view. He made no statement on his son’s arrest and the allegations against him, and stopped meeting the press or making appearances on TV shows. The only connection he continued to maintain was with his fans, online and offline and today it is one of the biggest and most active fan communities of a Bollywood star. Khan’s son Aryan, centre, was arrested in an alleged drug bust [File: Rajanish Kakade/AP Photo] When Pathaan was released in January, Khan’s fans across the world bought 50,000 tickets for the first day, first show, said Paryani. For Jawan, they beat their own record and bought 85,000 tickets. With a total gross earning of 21 billion rupees ($253m) at the box office, Khan is now being credited for reviving Bollywood, which had been struggling for a hit for the last few years. “There’s a well thought out strategy behind what we have seen — Shah Rukh Khan as a phenomenon in 2023,” Girish Johar, producer and film business expert, told Al Jazeera. “The films were positioned, marketed and released in such a manner that his fan base, box-office numbers and his craze increases day by day, with every film,” he said. Pathaan, a multi-star film with big Bollywood stars like Deepika Padukone, John Abraham and Salman Khan, was released on India’s Republic Day weekend in three languages on a large number of screens domestically and overseas. Jawan, by Atlee, a leading Tamil director, had some big southern Indian stars who have a massive fan following in India and abroad. “Hindi films used to clock [250 million to 300 million rupees; $3m-3.6m] in the south. Jawan was the first Bollywood film which has done [700 million to 800 million rupees; $8.4m-9.6m] business in the south,” Johar said. Khan’s fans are upbeat about Dunki, whose title refers to the “donkey route” used to smuggle people from the subcontinent to Europe. “The film’s content will speak for itself,” they say and are focused on ensuring that the film, made on less than one-third of Jawan’s budget, beats it at the box office. Industry insiders are sceptical that will happen because, unlike Khan’s two action films this year, Dunki is an emotional drama about illegal migration from Punjab to the United Kingdom, and in India these days, action scores over emotion. 2023: Shah Rukh Khan’s reinvention Shah Rukh Khan celebrating his birthday with his fans in Mumbai last month [Courtesy: Red Chillies] In 2016, Khan, often called the “King of Bollywood”, ranked number-one with a brand value of $131.2m in Duff & Phelps’s celebrity valuation report. By 2022, he had dropped to the number-10 position with a value of $55.7m in 2022. “2023 can be defined as the year of Shah Rukh Khan’s reinvention,” PR veteran and image guru Dilip Cherian said, explaining how Khan took charge of his “reinvention” by doing three things. For one, Khan, known for playing romantic leads, focused on aligning his films with the mood of the nation by opting to play characters that were all about “heroism, machismo and nationalism”. “Take any of the big marquee films in the last one year — all of the films have featured men with guns on posters,” said Rohini Ramnathan, a radio jockey who anchored Khan’s birthday celebrations on November 2 with fans. The second thing that Khan did was to retain control of his brand, image and the narrative about him by “totally abandoning the mainstream media”, Cherian said. That ensured he did not have to answer any questions or lose his cool with journalists as had happened in the past. He replicated his strategic disconnection with the media in a big way, taking social media and digital platforms by storm. His strategy, added Cherian, has been to project himself and his films as a narrative one cannot ignore, while distance from mainstream media has helped him respond to any misinformation at his own pace and time. The third thing Khan did was to galvanise his fan base globally, in a manner that makes his fan following one of the most active and involved ones. “Taking his most recent example of Pathaan, he chose social media as the launch pad for marquee initiatives and mileposts in the films’ calendar, where engagement with his billion-plus fan base was his priority,” Cherian said. As both a star and a producer of TSeries, one of India’s top music companies, Khan now works out of 88,000-square feet new office in Mumbai’s prime location, Juhu. He used everything that he has captured, and engaged with marketing intelligently, said Cherian. And now, the real test for Khan’s reinvention is Dunki. Will he be able to make use of the strategies he has built over the years, even while taking control of his narratives during many volatile situations like his son’s arrest, to turn the fortunes of the film around? Cherian, for one, believes in Khan and his p&q strategy – patience and quality that could rewrite the rules of the game, and would also make it difficult for any mishap to go wild, because Khan now has a clear understanding of how to manage the situations. This is the first of the two-part series on Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as he gears up for his upcoming release Dunki, and his plans for the near future. Done. Like it? Share it! Share on × Remember to publish your changes in order to increase user engagement. Close ×
Shah Rukh Khan’s Approach to Reclaiming Bollywood
