Box Office Clash - Three Words That Terrify Bollywood. Here's A History

Will Bollywood ever embrace its own 'Barbenheimer' weekend?

The last couple of showbiz weeks have been about two box office clashes – one current, the other impending. Barbie vs Oppenheimer snowballed into 'Barbenheimer' and while the Margot Robbie-led Barbie has outperformed Oppenheimer(except in India where it's the other way round), both films have been huge money-spinners. If there's a lesson to be learnt, it is this, to use the famous line from Field Of Dreams: if you build it, they will come – make good films and movie-goers will watch. Barbie and the Christopher Nolan-directed Oppenheimer, the yin to each other's yang tonally, both received good reviews and audiences worldwide have embraced the double feature instead of picking a side.   

In almost laughable contrast, Karan Johar had a meltdown on Threads over a box office clash that will only happen at the end of this year. He shared a post about another producer having booked the same release date as a Dharma film "without the courtesy of a phone call." The films in question – he didn't name either – are thought to be Sriram Raghavan's Merry Christmas, starring Katrina Kaif and Vijay Sethupathi, and the KJo-produced Yodha, starring Sidharth Malhotra. Both will release on December 15 and this appears to have sent the Dharma boss into a tailspin.

Niceties of phone calls and suchlike aside, Bollywood's baseline insecurity was laid bare in Karan Johar's post – the fear, or perhaps the knowledge, that their own film would not survive competition and therefore must avoid it at any cost. Setting the box office on fire is a secondary consideration to the worry that one's own film might go down in flames should it have to compete with another's.