The latest offering in the AVENGERS series has taken the box office by storm and shaken the filmmakers as well as the trade pundits giving them a marketing lesson, which ironically is the one, we ourselves used to successfully thrive upon in the past.
So whether one finds Avengers: Infinity War a thoroughly enjoyable or an underwhelming film individually, the fact remains that it strongly reminds you of the era of mega multistarrer Hindi films, that used to become the much awaited projects right from the date of the announcements in the leading film magazines before the mid-90s. Fans of different stars featuring in it could be seen thronging the theaters forming long queues for the advance bookings from Monday onwards, which is exactly, what we have witnessed in the case of the recent Avengers movie released in all major centers.
Sharing my personal experience of watching Avengers: Infinity War, it honestly took me back to the 80s when theaters used to be jam-packed in every show of the first Friday and whistles, hooting, shouts were heard at regular intervals in the movie right from the beginning to the finale fight in the climax. Would love to elaborate on this specific feature of those exciting multi-starrer films, taking you back in time to the decades of 70s-80s.
The first applause in such projects had to be in the titles, when names of all the big heroes could be seen on the screen coming one after another with an energetic background effect. Admittedly at times, even the heroines names were applauded with some different kind of whistles going with the flow. The second euphoria used to be there in the introduction scenes of every star coming on screen in a typical filmy manner, hugely celebrated by their individual fans sitting in the theater. In fact these introductory scenes happened to be the key attraction of these films, aiming at giving you some kind of cinematic bliss, which mostly worked in a big way satisfying the exciting audience.
Next the claps and whistles could be heard in the stars scenes together (more than once) in the script, wherein they either used to do something collectively or confront each other with explosive dialogues or fights to be sorted later as a routine. Lastly the public used to go crazy in the final 30 minutes of the film, with one hero helping out the other in his tough moments fighting with the villain or villains (grouping together at a specific place) heading towards a happy ending.
Interestingly, I once again experienced this all after decades while watching an English film for a change, which in reality progresses in exactly similar pattern of our mutlistarrer Hindi films of the gone era.
To tell the truth (that might sound funny to many), I honestly recalled a specific sequence of
J. P. Dutta’s GHULAMI (1985) while watching
Avengers: Infinity War, when
Mithun Chakraborty hears the gunshots, having a casual nap, travelling on the top of a local bus. Knowing that this is a one man's fight going on with the zamindars for clean water, he jumps off the bus holding his machine gun and joins
Dharmendra, who has just been shot on the shoulder. I still remember the loud noise people made watching him jump from the bus.
After more than three decades, witnessed a similar roar in the theater, the moment THOR joins in the team fighting the huge number of weird creatures attacking them all, and later, when the superheroes rescue each other, rendering their witty one liners.
The entire format and story progression actually once used to be an integral part of our own Hindi Cinema.
In short, I found AVENGERS very close to our multistarrer films of the past that actually worked like an enjoyable roller coaster ride with spirited sequences coming one after another keeping you thoroughly engrossed winning over the box office. Yash Chopra largely began the trend with his WAQT (1965), which was then religiously followed by Manmohan Desai, Prakash Mehra, Raj Kumar Kohli, Rakesh Roshan and many more producers/directors in the later decades. The new millennium saw Karan Johar, Aditya Chopra, Rohit Shetty and more successfully working on the same formula that unfortunately stopped becoming feasible as soon as the internet resulted in big online fan-grouping system intentionally ridiculing ‘the other’ and the stars too going on a new-age digital EGO-TRIP (widening the gap) led by fake collections and more like never before.
Moreover failures of many such star-studded mega projects, unbelievable prices charged by the big names and trend of doing one film at a time (following Aamir Khan) became the other major reasons why 2 or 3 hero multi-starrer films were not seen in the last decade or so.
Thankfully the news of projects like KALANK, 2.0 and THUGS OF HINDOSTAN looks like the beginning of a new era, bringing back the glory of the past decades. And we really hope they successfully sort out both the constraints of COST and EGOS soon, coming up with more similar multi-starrer films bringing people back to the theater like the good old days.
Otherwise these foreign films and production houses are just on the verge of taking over the entire film business in our country too.
Cheers!
(Note: The article was first published on UC-News Mobile App in April 2018)
