CO V E R S TOR Y
Will The ‘Superstar’ Khans manage to get back their position in 2022? Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan have had a dream run at the box office for twenty years but now things have changed and their downslide has already begun. Sumita Chakraborty wonders whether the magical Khans can bounce back? Can they storm back on the number one position in 2022?
A
sk any avid cine goer which stars have ruled Bollywood in the last two decades and more likely than not, the answer would be the magical ‘Khans’ – Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan and Aamir Khan. The Khans have enjoyed their superstar tags that veered from ‘Badshah’ to ‘Sultan’ and have been always considered head ‘n’ shoulders above the rest. Yes, Hrithik Roshan, Ranveer Singh, Tiger Shroff, Ranbir Kapoor and some more younger stars have often challenged them at some point or the other but the end result was that, these young guns created a niche for themselves and the Khans
continued to rule the Hindi film industry. But then the unexpected happened… The pandemic hit the world and caused severe havoc. People were restricted from going out and a major lockdown happened. Theatres, malls and everything else closed down and a new norm of WFH (work from home) started. Suddenly, the world took a ‘360’ degrees turn and things changed drastically. Entertainment wise, the OTT platforms became larger than life and content became the real superstars. Sitting at home, viewers were exposed to world cinema and they started bingeing on good content. 15
