The year of Shah Rukh Khan: 25 Years of Indian Cinema

The year Bollywood tried to prove it wasn't going to go under the South juggernaut which had nearly steamrolled over it in the past two years, with Kantara, RRR and KGF.

Shah Rukh Khan ruled Bollywood with Jawan and Pathaan in 2023.

To say that 2023 was the year of SRK is a no-brainer. It was also the year that Bollywood proved that it wasn’t going to go under the South juggernaut which had nearly steamrolled over it in the past two years, with Kantara, RRR and KGF, coasting on their larger-than-life computer-graphics-heavy tales.

January began with Pathaan, in which we were asked to tighten our seat belts: ‘kursi ki peti’ has never been as sexy. The YRF-produced, Sidharth Anand-directed spy actioner which touched down on global hotspots before whizzing off to the next destination delivered mad spoofy silly fun.

Atlee’s Jawan was SRK basically showing us everything he’d got, in a father-and-son double role. It was a massy masala movie in the Atlee mould, which meant that at every turn you have scenes-and-dialogues meant for taalis-and-seetis. And of course, there was that line: bete ko haath lagaane se pehle, which brought the house down.

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It felt almost anti-climactic that SRK’s third film of 2023, Rajkumar Hirani’s Dunki turned out to be such a clunker. Given the star’s ascendancy, and the director’s penchant for giving us films that make us laugh and cry, this tracking-the-dunkey-route-to-the-promised-land should have been much better than it turned out to be.

Sunny Deol returned to Gadar territory, and the sequel, also by director Anil Sharma, gives us a middle-aged Tara Singh, living happily with his beloved wife Sakeena, with a strapping son who goes missing. So it’s back to bashing bad Pakistani generals, with young ‘un losing his heart to a pretty Pakistani girl : and of course it’s back to Sunny and his dhai kilo ka haath winning the battle.

Karan Johar’s Rocky and Rani Ki Prem Kahani got him back to his comfort zone of the rom com, with Ranveer Singh and Alia Bhatt playing the-Punjabi munda-and-the-Bengali-girl who fall for each other, who then have to win their respective families over. What jhumka, went Alia, and everyone swooned.

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The film that had moviegoers deeply divided was Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Animal, starring Ranbir Kapoor with a violent guy with serious daddy issues, said daddy being Anil Kapoor. That Vanga has the ability to carry a scene is no dispute. That Ranbir has the ability to get into the skin of the character is in no dispute either. Zero surprises then that the film which gave its leading man the sort of animalistic tendencies which would put real animals to shame turned out to be one of the biggest hits of the year.

The two best series of the year were Vikramaditya Motwane’s sparkling Jubilee, which takes us back to the beginnings of the Bombay film industry, Jubilee, starring Prosenjit Chatterjee, Aparshakti Khurrana, Aditi Rao Hydari, Ram Kapoor among others; and Sudip Sharma-Randeep Jha’s Kohrra, a Punjab-set murder mystery which gave us actors– Suvinder Vicky, Barun Sobti, Manish Chaudhuri, Varun Badola and others– who looked as if they had sprung from the soil, and a story that kept us in its grip right till the very end.

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