Rajnikanth's 'Kabali' hit the screens on July 22. So what makes Rajinikanth, the ultimate Superstar and such a phenomenon? Click through to find out.
The advance booking for Kabali opened on Wednesday, 20 July, two days before the movie’s release and by Thursday morning, the tickets for the entire weekend had been snapped up. This had never happened before, not even for a Rajinikanth film.
“We’re not a regular, big multiplex, so most of our shows, apart from opening day and prime-time slots on Saturday and Sunday, fill up after release. This is the first time ever that the first three days are sold out, as is the Monday noon show,” said Rakesh Gowthaman, managing director of Vettri Theatres.
What comes next is pretty much de rigueur for a Rajinikanth movie in Chennai, the capital of India’s Tamil Nadu state and the hub of the Tamil movie industry.
Fans of the movie star start streaming in at midnight on Thursday with drums, sweets and cans of milk. Sparkling banners and confetti are hung across the front courtyard and, as is the tradition, towering cut-outs of the superstar are bathed in milk—a ritual that follows the release of every Rajinikanth movie.
Pandemonium follows when the doors to the auditorium are flung open. As the letters R-A-J-I-N-I scrawl out in an all-too familiar style, between ‘SUPER’ and ‘STAR,’ for some 20 seconds, everything is drowned out by the whistling and cheering that breaks out.
“The first day festival, to my knowledge, started only with Rajini sir,” said Gowthaman, choosing his words carefully. “People look at the opening like a celebration.”
Kabali tells the story of an ageing gangster’s comeback after 25 years of imprisonment in a Malaysian jail and his subsequent search for his family and, ultimately, revenge against the enemies who had framed him. It has the stylish stunts and punch lines that are the staple of every Rajinikanth starrer. It’s the first time in his career that Rajinikanth is playing the role of an old man.
“It was a challenge to give him a look of his own age, complete with that white beard and salt-and-pepper hair,” said director Pa. Ranjith. “When I told him I could write a story only for a character his own age, he said he was also looking for something like that.”
Most movie reviews were harsh, with critics beefing about the slow pace at which the story unfolds while giving Rajinikanth’s performance the thumbs-up. But Ranjith doesn’t have reason to worry about the audience’s response.
In the first five days of release, Kabali, which was also dubbed in Hindi, Telugu and Malay, amassed around Rs 225-230 crore in domestic and overseas box-office collections, said a trade analyst who declined to be named.
Many companies based in Chennai declared a holiday on the day Kabali released so that their staff could go and watch the movie. After all, it’s a movie starring a man revered asThalaivar (the leader) in Tamil Nadu, someone who has a fan following worldwide in the Tamil-speaking diaspora.
Rajini had some 55,000 fan clubs registered around the world in 2001, after which he stopped certifying them.
When he joined the micro-blogging site Twitter in 2014, Rajinikanth broke the first-day record for all Indian celebrities, gaining 215,000 followers.
As fans flew in from as far as Japan to watch the film on his home turf in Chennai, an online fan club called ‘Rajini: Biggest Superstar in India’, with about 300,000 followers, gathered a flash mob at a theatre in Chennai to discourage the circulation of pirated copies of the film.
Film distributors in neighbouring Karnataka state tied up with five-star hotels to organize screenings of the film with tickets priced at Rs 1,300 each.
What could possibly explain the mania surrounding a man who in real life is a balding 65-year-old and makes no bones about the fact? Someone who is as comfortable wearing a crumpled kurta as he is on screen dressed in the stylish suits he dons in Kabali. And before he got a role in the movies, was a bus conductor in Bengaluru.
“It (the appeal) is basically to do with his humility, everyone knows he was a bus conductor and a coolie before he became a star. That created a halo around him which works even today. He’s a common man’s man who’s come up from nowhere,” said independent trade analyst Sreedhar Pillai.
Journalist and Tamil movie buff Ramakrishnan Mohan says there are some things most people who watch Rajinikanth’s films agree on: he cannot dance; his onscreen persona, at least in the post-1990s era, has been preachy, patriarchal, tilting towards the spiritual and, sometimes, cringeworthy.
But the audience love his mannerisms—the signature walk, the way he throws a cigarette up in the air and catches it between his lips (he replaced the cigarette with chewing gum to cultivate a more responsible image), and his natural comic timing.
“...you can’t really call Rajinikanth an actor, he’s more a stylized person—the way he presents his dialogues, romances or fights—and depends on punch lines,” Pillai reasoned. “He is the only hero who is able to strike a chord with the common man on the street and the upper class; you have both the multiplex and the single-screen audience rooting for him. Plus, Tamil cinema is driven by the youth, and audiences who were not even born when he was a superstar, in the late 1980s or 1990s, are big fans of his today.”
The stardom may be unparalleled, but the star sure has worked on building his audience.
Unlike contemporary Kamal Haasan, Rajinikanth has always been particular about targeting family audiences and getting a ‘U’ (universal) certificate for his films, Pillai said.
With every new cinematic outing that promises the man bigger cut-outs, crazier fans and greater celluloid immortality, there are challenges. The first is to do with whether his incredible stardom has pushed Rajinikanth into a rabbit hole, where he can never really experiment with his roles and the kind of pressure that consequently is put on his directors.
“For his fans, everything in a Rajinikanth film has to be about him,” film writer Bharathi Pradhan said. “They’re unabashedly chauvinistic and macho, but that’s how it is. A typical Rajini fan would never go watch Kochadaiiyaan, where he’s an animated character; they want him in flesh and blood.”
An even bigger challenge for film makers is to keep those typical commercial Rajnikanth elements while coming up with something new. The audiences in south India may be worshipful of their screen idols to the point of servility, but can be demanding, Pradhan says. They are particular about movies getting the special effects and computer generated imagery right. So they want their Rajinikanth along with technical finesse and something different and new. “It’s definitely a challenge to direct a star like him,” admitted K.S. Ravikumar, director of Rajini films such as Muthu (1995), Padayappa (1999) and Lingaa(2014).
While it’s very easy, he said, to work with the actor himself, who has no star hang-ups and still behaves like a newcomer, is very sharp, punctual and involved despite bouts of ill health, it’s tough to decide on a story and screenplay for him. “We wouldn’t want to end up doing something he’s done before. But at the same time, it isn’t easy to predict if the new approach will work for his audience—which spans from young children to old people,” he said. “It’s a challenge for everybody. Even for Ranjith, who is known for his realistic style of filmmaking in his previous two films. But that, will be the highlight of Kabali. We have to wait and see how Rajini does realism and if he adds his own style or punch lines.”
People go to the theatres to watch Rajnikanth and they don’t want him in a slow-paced narrative or a sad and preachy role, says Gowthaman.
“Anyway, he does a film once in a couple of years. So, people want to see him as Rajinikanth only,” he reasoned. “There are so many people to act and do different kinds of characters. Why Rajinikanth at this age? If he were young, say 30 or 40, he could have done so many roles. We don’t know how many films Rajinikanth is going to do, why trouble him unnecessarily with other roles? He should stick to what he’s best at, which is style. So let him do that.”
Then there are the economics of making a Rajinikanth movie. The cost automatically shoots up and a movie has to rake in so much more at the box office to recover costs and turn in a profit. Trade experts who declined to be named said Kabali would have cost some Rs 100 crore, out of which Rs 40 crore would have gone towards paying Rajinikanth’s fees.
“When he comes in, the project becomes big. He has said very clearly that the film has to be commercially viable because there is so much riding on him. If he makes an art-house type of movie, nobody will come watch it and it’ll flop,” Pillai said. “An example he has quoted is of a special appearance he had done in a film called Kuselan, and it bombed because it was sold at the price of a Rajinikanth film. He made a correction on that, saying you can’t sell a film I did a special appearance in at the same rate as a full-length feature film.”
The superstar has clearly learnt his lessons. Besides Kuselan, his previous release, Lingaa, was also sold to distributors at an astronomical price, nearly double the amount a Rajinikanth film typically gets. Despite gross box office earnings of Rs 149 crore, it failed to make a profit. To be sure, Rajinikanth is known to have refunded distributors and exhibitors who lost money on movies starring him. “Rajinikanth is the only hero who gives back money to his distributors and producers, if and when his films fail. That has been his trademark and, possibly, the reason for his longevity at the box office,” Pillai pointed out. “Trade people are very tricky and they will dump you the moment your film fails. But what keeps them going in this case is the belief that here is a man who will cut down on their losses. And that has been a huge influencing factor.”
The costs, however, don’t really matter when the superstar pretty much guarantees a sold-out weekend and in states like Tamil Nadu, a sold-out first week. Kabali co-producer D. Paranthaman said the makers of the movie were looking at releasing the movie in nearly 10,000 screens, including in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, Sri Lanka, Switzerland, Denmark, Holland, Sweden, and South Africa. “Earlier, we were restricted to single theatres, now we’ve gone to malls and multiplexes. So, when you’re charging Rs 200-300 for a ticket, the quality of the film should be on par,” reasoned P. Vasu, director of Rajinikanth-starrers such as Mannan (1992),Uzhaippali (1993) and Chandramukhi (2005) “Today, the reach of a cinema is such that you can collect whatever you spent within four-to-five days if the film is running to packed houses. And with Kabali, it’s definitely possible. People are waiting to see it. So I’m sure it’ll get a full opening.”
The makers of Kabali have nothing to worry about.
Even before its release, the film earned Rs 200 crore from the sale of theatrical rights, endorsement deals and sale of merchandise, recovering its cost twice-over, according to Indian news reports. The movie will also be dubbed in Chinese and Thai languages by September, co-producer Paranthaman said.
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