No One Killed Jessica? Check. Yamla Pagla Deewana? Check. Dhobi Ghat? Check. The reason Dil Toh Baccha Hai Ji is not in the above list is because its still early days for the films box-office standing to emerge. The trade,however,is optimistic about the Madhur Bhandarkar comedy. That makes this an official good start to the New Year. Safe to believe then that the dreaded January Jinx is broken? Did Bollywood heave a collective sigh of relief? This January Jinx business gave a lot of heartache to a lot of producers. With films flopping every other Friday,star salaries hitting the roof and piracy eating away the pie,the producers are having a tough time. With cricket becoming a major factor,scheduling a films release is turning out to be tougher than securing a top stars dates. Take the current year for instance: all releases are being spaced so as to avoid the ICC Cricket World Cup and then the IPL 4 extravaganza. Board exams also need to be handled with care. Soon the monsoons descend and then its full circle with wintry fog to worry about up there in North. You got to feel for the producers. When do they release a film? How to secure that elusive window of a solo Friday so that your movie gets a fair chance to make a killing of the weekend? On top of all this tension,stupid superstitions add their own drama. Bollywood has too many of these superstitions. Not too long ago,it was believed that films on Bollywood would not work based on the film industry flop. Rangeela and Om Shanti Om proved otherwise. There is no accounting for individual superstitions. Before My Name Is Khan,Karan Johar preferred to have his movie titles begin with the alphabet K. His next,Student Of The Year,proves that Karan has indeed left K behind. At the same time,Rakesh Roshans affair with K follows,Kites was his latest and Krrish 2 is next. Numerology is a big deal for our B-town citizens,who do all that they can to flash their lucky numbers on the number-plates of their cars as well as on the movie poster. Akshay Kumar,for instance,likes the release date of his films to be 3,6 or 9. On the other side,all of Shah Rukh Khans cars have number 555. To each their own,but one wonders about the authenticity of these superstitions. At the end of the day,a film works on its own merits. All the January releases prove it yet again. On paper,these projects were hardly sure-shot bets. In the case of No One Killed Jessica,it was generally believed that women dont make a poster and hardly ever sell a movie. The Rani-Vidya combo tweaked the belief. Yamla Pagla Deewana,the second Deol extravaganza after Apne,was at best expected to be lapped up in the North but the films collections defied that. As for Dhobi Ghat,a 95- minute film without an interval,which had art house written all over,could have gone either way. You can credit the success of Kiran Raos directorial debut to husband Aamir Khans marketing wizardry but the fact is that the movie made money. Ultimately thats the only bottomline that matters in Bollywood. The jinx is broken. The audience is watching. Bollywood better dream up some new stories. Fast.
