Bollywood’s Banker Bashing Blockbuster

So, does the success of Dhoom 3 seal Aamir Khan’s reputation as a market whiz?

Is Aamir Khan really a marketing genius? It’s a label that has been slapped onto the actor often enough. And the scorching success of his Dhoom 3—whether or not you buy the Rs 500 crore box-office figure put out by Yash Raj Films—is reason enough not to dismiss the question.

That Khan considers himself an actor-cum-marketer has been evident for quite some time, long before he subjected himself to ridicule by wearing a bowler hat wherever he went—reportedly for an entire year—to advertise the hat-trick of hits the Dhoom franchise was betting on. So far, so ho-hum. He’d done much the same with a bizarre haircut for an earlier film. His KBC appearance and Dhoom video game, again, were hardly the stuff of innovation.

Ah, but as the film’s release date of 20 December approached, its marketers did something crazy. Instead of going all out with its music soundtrack to generate a buzz, YRF decided to let it out only in dribbles. For some strange reason, the studio erased the title track’s original back-up refrain, released only teasers of its other love songs, and tightened its screws on piracy in a way Bollywood had never seen. Planned as an all-digital show in over 4,000 halls, not counting the 500-odd for its Telugu and Tamil dubbed versions and 900 overseas, the movie’s strategy was to have its music—forget broadcast media, even YouTube had little of it on offer—draw crowds into theatres over and over again. “The marketing team at YRF was terrified,” Khan has been quoted by Reuters as saying, “They were convinced we were doing something disastrous…”

Well, if defying a market norm doesn’t take guts, what does?

Guess what: beyond the movie’s biker thrills, Kat skills and destiny drills, not to mention its swipes at Chicago School bankers, what might have done the trick for it is its love story. The film’s cornerpiece is an operatic song sequence, Malang, which features an acrobatic Khan with a flame and a whirly Katrina Kaif in red-and-black, and both in a dervish act of hypnotic hummability. The movie’s central theme, however, is the story of one Iqbal Haroon Khan’s progeny: a Zaahir Khan for the world at large, and the other, a secret self held under cover to ensure that their acts of dikhayi and safai work in tandem for a Great Indian Stunt.

Stroke of genius or not, cracking a complex market is no easy challenge—and few Hindi films have ever done such a spectacular job of it. Take another bow, Katrina and Aamir! Or is it Victor Acharya and YRF?

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Aresh Shirali