A Season of Love

IT’S 1990, AASHIQUI portrays the love between an aspiring singer and a model with a tragic back story. Both actors are new. Many songs are sung and the film, made for `30 lakh, clocks `10.5 crore at the box office. It is directed by Mahesh Bhatt.

In 2013, a once successful singer falls in love with an aspiring singer. The songs they sing are hummed even a decade later. The film, made on a budget of `15 crore, makes `109 crore at the box office. The movie is called Aashiqui 2, produced by Mahesh Bhatt and directed by his nephew Mohit Suri. The lead actors with unsuccessful films behind them break their jinx.

In 2025, an ambitious young singer with anger issues falls in love with a bud­ding writer. Many heartbreaks later, they are united. The movie is called Saiyaara and directed by Mohit Suri. It does `404 crore and counting at the box office.

Every generation needs its love story, so does every production house. The median age of a theatre goer, according to an Ormax Media report of 2024, is 24.1, which is a drop from 27.5 years pre-pandemic. There was an attrition of 23.7 million theatrical audience, and almost all of it came from the 31+ age group.

The post-pandemic generation is yearning for a connection with each other, and Saiyaara, with its time-worn tale of a simple young girl who falls in love with a broken young man, seems to have found resonance. While stories of its impact may have been exaggerated, there is no doubt that the love story with a profusion of ballads has landed well.

Not a moment too soon. The sighs of relief around Mumbai production houses are as loud as they are collective. Movies with eyeball gouging violence have had their day, while horror comedies are marching to their own Maddock-inspired drumbeat. Romantic movies starring star children didn’t seem to be taking off, with a spate of them be­coming more popular as memes rather than as movies, always a dangerous sign. There was Loveyapa, starring Junaid Khan and Khushi Kapoor, offsprings of Aamir Khan and Sridevi, re­spectively. Released theatrically, it made `12 crore at the box office, despite being extensively promoted by the star dad. This was soon followed by Nadaaniyan, released on Netflix, starring Ibrahim Ali Khan and Khushi Kapoor again. Ibrahim Ali Khan, who is popular on social media with 1.4 million followers, was a non-starter as a Noida schoolboy.

Not surprisingly, Saiyaara’s produc­ers Yash Raj Films were nervous about the film, which stars Ahaan Panday, actor Chunky Panday’s nephew, and Aneet Padda who has acted before in Salaam Venky, a movie directed by Revathy, and a streaming series for Prime Video’s Big Girls Don’t Cry. They informed journalists about Saiyaara when the trailer launched, while also ensuring that the young actors were not available for interviews. The music, especially the lead song by Kashmiri artistes Faheem and Arslan, gained popularity even as the marketing buzz about the film was orchestrated.

There were stories of young people fainting in theatres, taking their shirts off, and in one ridiculous case, of a young man watching the film while on an IV drip, all carefully amplified to add to the virality.

But more than the manufactured buzz was the freshness of the pair, the Korean-style drama (inspired by the 2004 movie A Moment to Remember) and a talented ensemble cast, including ev­eryone’s favourite new onscreen mom, Geeta Agrawal Sharma. Bhatt—who has been there, done that—believes the return of romance is a larger comment against the violence that was intended to replicate the larger narrative around the existing power centre. So, the Saiyaara hero has issues with his father, just as in the 2023 Animal, the epitome of hyper-masculine popular culture, but the love of a good, simple woman is enough to heal him. “It is gratifying to see the idea of love, which is as old as Mother India, triumphing in the age of algorithms and cynicism,” Bhatt says, adding that YRF’s USP as the Original House of Romance, and Suri’s authentic voice of love should not be undermined. The best work, he says, comes out of a personal bleeding wound, and it is true of Suri, whose mother, Bhatt’s sister, died when he was eight, and he was brought up by a father who preferred playing cards and drinking with friends to raising his children. Addiction to anger, to alcohol, are running themes in Suri’s work, and the absent father in Saiyaara is not a coincidence.

SAIYAARA’S SUCCESS HAS been bookended by the release of Anurag Basu’s Metro…in Dino, in theatres, and of Vivek Soni’s Aap Jaisa Koi on Netflix. Metro…in Dino, a spiritual sequel to Life in a Metro (2007), made `65 crore at the box office, with a budget of `50 crore. Its mul­tiple storylines, exploring different and intersecting relationships, carried with it the nostalgia of the original as well as some knockout ballads by Pritam and Papon. Aap Jaisa Koi, about a free-spirited Bengali woman, seemingly plucked out of Shoojit Sircar’s Piku (2015), who falls in love with a sanskari Sanskrit teacher from Jamshedpur, has done well on Net­flix, earning praise for the leads Fatima Sana Shaikh and R Madhavan.

Madhavan, 55, is grateful for the chance to act in a romance given that the window on that is closing unless Bolly­wood starts writing about relationships between people in their 50s. “I was very nervous playing this character because all said and done I am still a decade older than the character I was playing in the film. And Fatima being such a pretty lady I was hoping the pairing would be palatable. But the story seems to have resonated with a lot of people. Will I have the guts to go back to make romances, I don’t know, but no one in India seems to think people in their late 40s or early 50s are capable of love,” he says.

And therein lies the issue. Most of our male stars are either well on their way to 60. The next generation is also a bit long in the tooth, with Ranbir Kapoor being 42, Ranveer Singh being 40 and even Vicky Kaushal and Ayushmann Khurrana are 37 and 40 respectively. Playing to the median age of moviegoers is not impossible but it does stretch plau­sibility when they play young lovers. Action suits ageing male stars even if it extracts a huge physical cost.

There is a clear shortage of young male stars in the traditionally male-dom­inated film industry. But all is not lost. There is a long list of love stories waiting to be released beginning with Dharma Movies’ Dhadak 2 on August 1. It is inspired by the 2016 Marathi film, Sairat, which was butchered in its first remake, also by Dharma Movies, Dhadak, seven years ago. Dhadak 2 is a remake of the 2018 Tamil movie, Pariyerum Perumal, directed by Mari Selvaraj. It talks about identity politics, situating the love story, set in a university campus, firmly on the axis of caste, which is still a touchy topic even seven decades after Indepen­dence, as seen in the backlash against Anant Mahadevan’s Phule, released earlier this year.

Somen Mishra, head of creative development, Dharma Movies, is responsible for the reality check on love stories, and says the trend keeps chang­ing in pop culture. “But also look at the world out there. There is so much bad news, wars, crashes, collapses. Love sto­ries offer a comfort zone, a warm secure space. Specific to Saiyaara, when young stars have to be launched, whether it is Bobby (1973), Maine Pyaar Kiya (1989) or Kaho Naa…Pyaar Hai (2000), passionate romances seem to be the way to go. Every generation has its own surprise romantic hit, or what I call rotloo romance (weepie romance). Saiyaara is this generation’s rotloo romance,” he says.

There are more love stories on the anvil. ‘Param Sundari’, featuring a North-meets-South romance, with Sidharth Malhotra and Janhvi Kapoor has been ready for release for a while now, while Aanand L Rai’s ‘Tere Ishk Mein’, with Dhanush and Kriti Sanon is expected soon. Kartik Aaryan and Ananya Panday are shooting ‘Tu Meri Main Tera Main Tera Tu Meri’ while Panday is also starring with Lakshya in ‘Chand Mera Dil’. Anurag Basu’s sequel to Aashiqui for T-Series, starring Kartik Aaryan and Sreeleela, is ready for a Valentine’s Day release in 2026, even as rumours swirl of it being similar to Saiyaara. Even Junaid Khan is returning to love with Sai Pallavi in Ek Din, about a transformative meet­ing between two strangers.

As filmmaker Vikramaditya Motwane, who made the searing and memorable Lootera in 2013, says, at the end of the day, we all want to be entertained. “Whether we laugh or cry or scream, we want to be moved in a highly charged way. Everyone is so angry right now, that a love story seems refreshing and nostalgic,” he says.

At a time when love is so easy, para­doxically, and yet so difficult, because of innate loneliness, Saiyaara with its boy who will give up his life’s goal for love, and its girl who will sacrifice her love for his ambition are throwbacks to another era of eternal lovers tinged with tragedy who will do anything for each other.

Technology can make desire ac­cessible and sex available but it is yet to replicate the emotions that make us truly human. And we don’t need Saiyaara to tell us why love remains the greatest gift to us all. And why, as the Irshad Kamil eponymous song says, it can seem a matter of life and death: “Haaye, main mar hee jaaun jo tujhko na paaun/Hothon pe lamha-lamha hai naam tera, haaye/Tujhko hee jaaun main, tujhko pukaarun (I will not survive, if you’re not with me/Every moment, on my lips is only your name/I sing only for you, I call out only to you).”

Aap Jaisa KoiBollywoodcinemaDhadak 2love storiesMetro...In DinoromanceSaiyaara