The Hindu Business Line : Bollywood's rich harvest in 2005

It's ending with a whimper, but there were a lot of bangs in 2005. "There is no doubt that this has been a very good year for the movies," says Uday Kaushish, New-Delhi based exhibitor-distributor.

In fact, filmmakers started uncorking the champagne as early as January this year. It started with Page 3, a Rs 3-crore movie which made Rs 15 crore, and which won Madhur Bhandarkar the best director tag at the National Awards. The film's performance set the tone for a year, which would, in the end, see both profits and accolades.

Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Black, made at Rs 22-23 crore, raised producer Applause Entertainment's bottom line; it also made both the trade and the informed viewer aware of the company, which was intent on making corporate Bollywood a real entity.

At a celebration do in New Delhi after the success of Black, the company's CEO Anshuman Swamy said, "When Sanjay came to us with his story, we had no idea that it would turn out to be such a big thing; all we knew is that we wanted to be a part of the movie, because we knew it would be special."

A whole bunch of hits popped up intermittently through the year. Soap queen Ekta Kapoor's recipe of raunch and more raunch gave her, after three duds, her first movie success. Kya Kool Hain Hum, made at Rs 6 crore, returned Rs 18 crore. Karan Johar deserted outsize romance for action with Kaal, which had good-looking men and women wandering around in a jungle. It also had Johar's good friend Shah Rukh Khan (SRK) shake a friendly leg with Malaika Arora Khan. It cost Johar Rs 12 crore, and it made twice that.

SRK's own production Paheli, a very mixed bag in terms of delivery and content (SRK plays a sexy ghost to Rani's lonely bride under non-mainstream director Amol Palekar), was also a surprising money-spinner. Produced at Rs 15 crore, it got back Rs 25 crore.

Currently, the film is India's official entry at the Oscars, and SRK is busy spending twice that amount on publicity and lobbying in Los Angeles. Whether it will enthuse the jury with its colour-drenched palette and Bollywood-style naach-gaana is unclear, but it is certainly a better bet than Devdas, also an SRK vehicle.

An old-style weepie, Vipul Shah's Waqt, which had Amitabh Bachchan play a loving father who straightens out his errant son, hit the buttons of the matrons and others both in India and abroad. It grossed Rs 35 crore, and was on the UK hit charts for a long time.

Another Bachchan-starrer gave Ram Gopal Varma his first hit in the last two years. A tribute to The Godfather in the director's words, Sarkar (produced at Rs 7 crore; made Rs 32 crore) presented the Big B in an `angry old man' mode, and gave a boost to his son Abhishek, who ably played second fiddle to his father, along with the talented Kay Kay Menon.

There was also Pradeep Sarkar's Parineeta, a period film made contemporary in its styling. Lilting music, a winsome heroine, and a Saif Ali Khan on a roll after his National Award for last year's Hum Tum created a flutter at the turnstiles; it may have been a `moderate success', according to distributor UTV (made at Rs 20 crore, it got back Rs 25 crore), but more than made up in terms of the buzz it generated.

The three biggest successes this year were split up, expectedly, between Yashraj Films, and entirely unexpectedly, Boney Kapoor. The latter's sex comedy production, No Entry, grossed Rs 45 crore (made at Rs 20 crore) and was his first success after too many box-office turkeys.

Yash Chopra's banner gave us rom-com Salaam Namaste with Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta living in and living it up in sunny Australia. Debutant director Siddharth Raj Anand's smart lines and the lead pair's `cool quotient' made the film a huge success. Made at Rs 12 crore, it returned Rs 40 crore. But the biggest this year is undoubtedly, Shaad Ali's Bunty Aur Babli. The fun-filled caper movie, starring Abhishek, Rani, and Amitabh, from the Yashraj stable, ran away with the summer of 2005,and made a staggering Rs 50 crore from a modest Rs 12-crore investment.

A dozen good films will remain the high point of this year, and will manage to drown out the disappointment of the big movies that nose-dived. Look at November and December's line-up, which was hyped to the skies, and did disastrously.

One of the biggest failures this year was Salman Khan's Kyun Ki. Even Salman's famed magnetic draw in the first three days (he is the king of the initial, even more so than SRK) couldn't save the movie. Ek Ajnabee flopped — it proved all over again that Amitabh is not invincible. So did Neal n Nikki, despite its heroine's desperately plunging neckline, and generous skin show. It also proved, for the first time in many years, that Yashraj Films which produced the film is not invincible too.

Some wonderful movies, which didn't rock the box office, left their stamp, too. Sudhir Mishra's Hazaaron Khwahishein Aisi, which took you back 30 years to the politics of the time (pre and post-Emergency), and how it impacted his leads, a few young people of privilege, is one of the most important films that have come out of Bollywood. It should have done better. So should have Kabeer Kaushik's Seher, which focused on the mafia in the badlands of Uttar Pradesh and a lone inspector's fight for justice. Both films told real stories of real people, engagingly and honestly.

Look at all the films that have done well this year. One common element, apart from production values, binds them: a cracking good story, told with a difference.