Salman Khan, Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, Amitabh Bachchan’s salaries are why producers shutting shop: Anurag Kashyap

Also read: Disney to shift focus from Bollywood to Hollywood in India

In an interview with catchnews.com, Kashyap poured his heart out over the situation in Bollywood, and how the payment issues matter here, rather than Hollywood. He said, “We had four Bollywood actors (Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan, Amitabh Bachchan) in the Forbes highest paid actors whereas the rest were Hollywood actors. The films starring the Hollywood actors earn in millions and billions but ours earn at max Rs 300 crore. But still, there are Indian actors on that list. So if you see the ratio on the list, business of the film vs income of the actor, there is a huge disparity. Actors from the industry where film earns Rs 300 crore is on the list and on the other hand, there are films which earn 1.2 billion in other industries and the actors are even below our actors on the list. So I hope you got where the issue is. I am not blaming the actors for this, all the blame should be passed on to the producers as they are ready to pay the actor such high amount. Why wouldn’t the actor take that money? If someone pays me, even I would take that.”

Kashyap, whose own production Bombay Velvet became one of the biggest disasters last year, added that the process of filmmaking in India is not correct and unless there is a change in the system of profit and loss, producers will continue to play safe in terms of scripts, to avoid any risk. This, in turn, will become a speed-breaker in the way of storytelling and discourage directors who want to experiment with cinema as the production houses will refuse to invest in something which they’ll find challenging.

Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan are among the world top 20 highest paid actors.

“We all need studios as they brought in a certain streamlining of movies side by side certain mistakes. What we lack in our industry are passionate producers. The intent of making films in India has drastically changed over the years. Films should be made because the director or producer believes in the script. You shed an old skin and grow a new one. To give rise to new, the old one has to die,” said Kashyap.

Also read: Shah Rukh Khan, Akshay Kumar among world’s highest paid actors, Salman Khan and Amitabh Bachchan in Forbes’ list too.

Four Bollywood stars made it to the Forbes’ list of world’s top 20 highest-paid actors this year,  Shah Rukh Khan (number 8 with $33 million in earnings), Akshay Kumar (number 10 with $31.5 million), Salman Khan (number 14 with $28.5 million) and Amitabh Bachchan (number 18 with $20 million). Deepika Padukone was the lone Indian actress in the world’s top 10 list of actresses with $10 million earnings.