Aamir Khan was initially attached to a biopic on entrepreneur Ashneer Grover, and news of the project leaked to much shock within trade circles. A superstar known for massive hits like ‘Dangal’ and ‘3 Idiots’ playing a former tech-preneur sounds a little offbeat, doesn’t it? Now there is an update; we know Aamir Khan has officially walked away from the biopic. Creative differences with the film’s director, Rahul Mody, resulted in the project stalling before any filming could take place.
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Honestly, for anyone closely following Bollywood developments, this should not come as a surprise at all. Aamir Khan is famously a careful chooser of scripts. When an actor spends months developing a script to eventually walk away, you know that the writing is literally on the wall. The idea of a superstar like Aamir Khan playing the part of a reality show judge may sound exciting on social media but translating it into a viable cinematic experience that will captivate a cinema audience for two hours is an entirely different task.
Why Aamir Spent Months On It
There is nothing hard to fathom on why Aamir would be inclined to do the biopic in the first place. India’s start-up landscape over the last few years has expanded massively, boasting dramatic funding rounds, humongous valuations, loud rivalries and sudden failures. Through the very popular reality show, ‘Shark Tank India’, Ashneer Grover quickly became a household name with his very blunt and often very aggressive persona resulting in him spawning memes that went viral in mere weeks.
Aamir was genuinely invested in exploring the world of the Indian start-up ecosystem. He spent hours sitting with Rahul Mody, reading multiple drafts, and developing a substantial narrative with him. But what will ultimately take a movie beyond catchy taglines and viral phrases is a strong plot structure which has issues when taken to a feature film length of 2 hours plus. Viral memes may look exciting when seen in short clips on a screen but cannot make for a compelling story arch.
The Rush For Corporate Drama
Bollywood will forever chase a trend. As soon as a sports biopic becomes a success, five similar stories are greenlit and as soon as a political drama does great, filmmakers are scrambling to obtain film rights for politics. The latest genre Hollywood tried to exploit was corporate drama where every film about Silicon Valley seemed to garner some serious buzz. The trouble is that, most of the time, the drama in a board room doesn’t make for thrilling cinema unless a human conflict is driving the story.
Hollywood managed it with ‘The Social Network’ back in 2010, which explored relationships between friends, jealousy and egos rather than just code and financial models. The Indian startup narrative has developed recently and most of the events have taken place in the past few years, which every internet user was tracking in real-time on their mobile phones on Twitter, LinkedIn or their favorite news platforms. Having the actor play the same event, only re-enacting them again does not provide the audience with any fresh content and therefore results in a story which most audiences have already heard.
The Problem Of Instant Overexposure
Overexposure has always proven to be an audience turnoff and it seems like this project is currently suffering from it. Ashneer Grover has already put out his version of the story through various mediums. His book, countless podcast appearances, reality TV shows like ‘Jhalak Dikhla Ja’, comedy shows, interviews etc. Have established the man and his opinions in the minds of people with no gaps in between, the result being that we know everything that needs to be known about the subject from the man himself and there’s nothing new or fresh about it.
When people step out into a cinema hall, they expect an experience or to hear a story never heard before; what they don’t want to do is pay money for what they’ve been watching on their phones over the past 6 months. It seems like the limitation has been identified by Aamir Khan in the script development phase itself.
How The Public Already Knows The Whole Plot
Biopics that are set in history or that are based on people who are already gone seem to get a lot of audience mileage because of time; no one can recall what the nuances of the historical event were, giving filmmakers a free hand to dramatize the narrative to surprise the viewers. However, when we have a film about BharatPe and Shark Tank India, the novelty has already been exhausted because people have been following the story unfold since inception – the public controversies, the board meetings, the audio clips and resignations have been heard on every channel and seen on social media across the country.
Every person that goes to watch the film will have a clear idea of every single plot point; the audience will already know how the company was formed, how the television show gained massive popularity and the end to the corporate dispute. A story without a mystery, an unexplored dimension, or an emotional perspective seems to reduce the script to a mere reproduction of headlines which doesn’t seem to work well as a full-fledged feature film and seems to be closer to a TV docuseries.
What Shraddha Kapoor and Rahul Mody Are Trying to do Now
However, Aamir Khan’s exit doesn’t mean the film has been shelved. Shraddha Kapoor is still attached to play Ashneer’s wife, Madhuri Jain Grover. Shraddha is also co-producing the film along with one of the biggest production houses in the country. At present, both Rahul Mody and Shraddha are scouting for a younger actor for the role of the lead.
There was news about Imran Khan being considered for the part, however, the actor quickly denied his involvement. Casting a younger actor makes sense from an age perspective, as Aamir Khan is 50+ whereas Ashneer Grover founded BharatPe in his late thirties and early forties, but simply swapping actors won’t resolve the narrative issues which led to Aamir Khan walking away from the project.
Why A Younger Lead Changes Nothing About The Flaw
Casting a younger actor for the role of Ashneer Grover seems like a desperate quick fix to the problem, however, the actual issue is not age but the narrative. In today’s time, audiences have become much more discerning with their spending power when it comes to theatrical releases. Mid-budget dramas that do not boast large scale or spectacular entertainment have already been facing a downfall and a better option for movie-goers to watch such movies remains on their OTT devices at home. Pitting a biopic of a corporate legend whose rise to fame has occurred recently will never be a success in the theatres and it appears like even the biggest superstar in the country realized that.
