Bollywood is an entity that is dearly associated with our feelings and worked as a connection between people. It was a part of the tea party discussion just like elections. Even non-Hindi people understood or tried to acquaint themselves with Hindi to watch these films.
What went wrong in the past couple of decades?
With the turn of this century, this phenomenon called Bollywood started declining and is now on a ventilator. Its fall is very evident in its approach if you look at the USP of the film industry. it worked like a team around Lionel Messi. Even Lionel Messi will retire but not that person.
Earlier movies carried mainly due to three reasons:
Good Songs: Movies had such soothing and classical songs, Sometimes copied but amazing to listen to till now. You didn’t have access to these songs as you have today. Most of the super hit movies in past times had a long list of storyline-connected songs.
Excellent Star-cast: I am not talking about lead personnel but the father/mother/friends portraying actors were superb. They put the movie to another level. The situational comedy of comical actors was just amazing. Even villains put the such extra effort that people thought of them as real-life bad people.
Story-line: If you look at the footfall for the movies. Word of mouth played an important role and this process relied on the storyline. Even today movie channels play these movies every now or then. People watch them repeatedly due to their storyline.
What happened to these USPs?
Songs were replaced by high beats, senseless lyrics, and remake songs that may generate great revenues but are not soothing, so not long-lasting. Someone was saying, at the end of your career, none will recognize you but your songs will define you. So short-term revenue-based modelled to a total downfall.
At present, the star cast looks like 100 heroes in one film, everybody presents himself as a hero and tries to put himself up and forgets his part. The most important part, the hero became the worst actor in that film. Villain looks like a person who went for Hero’s role but settled for counterpart. Fight Scenes became so boring and dialogues have gone overboard. The storyline that is the conscience of a movie has become repetitive and boring. Even when the storyline does some justice, actors make a mess of it. Bollywood needs to come out of the mindset that it is the only player in this field and a larger than life image of actors plays an important role.
South Indian movies and Hollywood are doing much better with the USP that led to the rise of Bollywood. Bollywood is currently stuck in the age-old habit of the same gravy in a new pot but people due to social media and communication networks are not falling into the trap of it. A band of online networks is giving tough competition to the big screen, if the big screen re-invents itself to the demands of people, then it can survive.
