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Director Karan Johar reflected on the critical and commercial success of his new film, Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, and said that he was concerned about the success of Barbie and Oppenheimer, which were released in India just a week before Rocky Aur Rani. Even as the two Hollywood blockbusters top the box office in countries around the world, in India, Rocky Aur Rani has been able to outperform them both.
The romantic comedy drama has made more than Rs 109 crore in India and over Rs 200 crore worldwide, while Oppenheimer recently crossed the Rs 100 crore mark in India, and Barbie is hovering around the Rs 30 crore mark. In an interview with Variety, Karan said that after the success of South Indian films last year, and the emergence of streaming platforms, he thought that a challenge from Hollywood was ‘all too much’. He said, “At first I had apprehension and fear and then there was deep-rooted anxiety because both these films also performed very well in India.”
But he stuck to his guns, and made a movie with the intention of appealing to multiple generations. “So even the Gen X, Gen Z kids, the millennials and the boomers, who’ve grown up watching the old Hindi film music, all of them collectively love the film for various and different reasons,” he said.
The key, according to him, is not making the politics preachy. “Because otherwise you lose an audience when you try and be extra preachy and try and give a sermon that doesn’t actually connect to you in an emotional way because you’ve got to love the people, then love what they say,” he said, admitting that the tone of the film ‘is lifted quite a few notches’. He added, “The world is, of course, far from real. If you see the homes, they’re exaggerated versions of what could be. In Delhi I know, I’ve seen ostentatious homes but the house of the Chatterjees – there’s no such size of house in Delhi… I think what is working for the film are the characters, within the world of melodrama, and notched up level of everything, dialed up to 11, the characters are still empathetic, they’re still saying things that are relatable…”
“Everybody had gotten a little confused about what tonality to do, forgetting that we have our own strengths, and we have to constantly leverage them,” he said about the low phase that Bollywood experienced last year. “Take that strength in the writing, put in cinema and just make good films. And we won’t need to fight with anyone. We will go back to being an individualistic force that we’ve always been. We went through a phase where we were a bit lost. We’re finding our paths out of this jungle.”
The film stars Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt in the lead roles, alongside legends such as Dharmendra, Jaya Bachchan and Shabana Azmi.
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