Stree 2, Singham Again and Bhool Bhulaiyaa have been crowned the highest-grossing Hindi films in the year 2024, but Anupam Kher says that the overall performance of Bollywood movies has not been its best when it comes to storytelling. Speaking to Hindustan Times, veteran actor, who recently starred in Vijay 69, said that it is high time we raise the standards of Bollywood films.
“Going to cinema is an outing that a person does with their family, so you have to improve the quality of cinema because you are competing with streaming platforms and the millions of sources of entertainment in the world. Why don’t we raise our bar?”
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He said that, though India is such a large country with many stories to tell, the same has not been reflected in the films. “Hindi cinema is still struggling to tell stories which are from our lands. Most stories you feel you have seen it somewhere, sometimes even the sequences are already seen in other films. The best way to reinvent yourself is to look back and look inside.”
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The Saaransh actor also highlighted the importance of OTT platforms. “I have been in films for 40 years now. Every time we blamed something’s rise for theatrical not doing well, but cinema is still going on. When VHS came or TV became commercial, people were like films will die, but it didn’t happen. With OTT, the same thing happened. But what OTT has done is it has created jobs for a lot of people and improved the quality of content.”
Kher also taked about the uniqueness of Akshay Roy's film Vijay 69, in which he played the lead role. “What makes Vijay 69 different is that it is a completely original script. Kahin pe bhi pehle kuch nahi dekha hai (haven't seen anything like this before anywhere). There is no unnecessary high speed shot or slo-mos. It’s about a human story.”
“Hindi cinema also has to cater to the audiences of many languages – be it Malayalam, Telugu or Gujarati. But it’s high time we write stories where people say ‘yes, we want to go to the theatres and watch this film’,” he added.