‘Bombay Velvet’ Joins Bollywood’s Big-Budget-Flops List
‘Bombay Velvet’ turned out to be disappointing, but it wasn’t the first film with a massive budget to have tanked
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With Bombay Velvet’s unfortunate fate at the box office, we revisit some of the ambitious Bollywood films that sank without a trace.
1. Roop Ki Rani Choron Ka Raja (1993)
An average film used to cost somewhere between Rs 1.25-1.75 Crore back in the 90s, but producer Boney Kapoor’s semi-fantasy con caper had an estimated budget of Rs 9 Crore. The film was originally helmed by Shekhar Kapur, who left the project midway, handing over the job for Satish Kaushik to finish. Six years in the making, the lavishly mounted film had ostentatious sets and a setting that had become outdated by the time it released. And it showed up as a monster dud at the ticket window.
2. Mera Naam Joker (1970)
For his magnum opus, Raj Kapoor had an entire circus and ballerina Kseniya Ryabinkina brought from Russia to act along with an array of Indian stars in this story about the life of a clown. His longest production, the film’s length was more than four hours and it had two intervals. It had such a terrible luck at the box office that it put the family into a financial ditch. However, the film’s reputation has grown over the years, and it’s considered to be quite the classic today.
3. Blue (2009)
Anthony D’Souza’s film was touted as India’s first underwater thriller with exotic locales, stunning photography and a budget of epic proportions, reportedly Rs 100 Crore! But the audience didn’t really lap up the film and the ambitious plot never rose to the surface.
4. Razia Sultan (1983)
Kamal Amrohi’s dream project Razia Sultan (1983), based on the life of the first female ruler of the Delhi Sultanate was said to be the most expensive film up to that point (estimates range from Rs. 4 -10 Crore). Before release, the historical romance, seven years in the making, also served gossips about Amrohi’s crazy expedition for excellence. But tacky sets and costumes, stilted dialogues, wrong casting, romance in favour of expensive battle scenes, and overall insipidness made the film inaccessible to the aam junta and it crashed in no time.
5. Asoka (2001)
Santosh Sivan’s long cherished project turned Shah Rukh Khan into Ashoka, the great emperor of the Maurya Dynasty with a dash of Bollywood extravaganza. The sword and sandal epic was touted as India’s answer to Mel Gibson’s Braveheart (1995). It made a few waves internationally too, but failed to impress the moviegoers here.
6. Ram Gopal Varma Ki Aag (2007)
Remaking Hindi cinema’s most revered classic was an ambitious but a terrible idea to start with. Ram Gopal Varma made a film so ridiculous that it died at the box office on day one, while making itself a strong contender for one of the worst films ever made.
7. The Burning Train (1980)
Taking a cue from the Hollywood disaster movies, Ravi Chopra fashioned an action thriller, as the title suggests, casting the biggest line up of stars possible. Needless to say, the budget was huge. Though praised for its technical achievements, Hindi cinema audiences didn’t find it thrilling enough to make it a hit. It remains the biggest flop of B. R. Chopra’s career as a producer.
8. Saawariya (2007)
When Sanjay Leela Bhansali announced that he would launch Ranbir Kapoor and Sonam Kapoor in Saawariya (2007), it sounded just perfect. But the esoteric adaptation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s White Nights left the audience feeling blue and they showed outright rejection. Also, the release against Farah Khan’s blockbuster Om Shanti Om only made matters worse.
9. Kites (2010)
Cooked like ‘pasta and not biryani’, Kites (2010) catered more to the foreign audience than the ones at the home turf. With huge hype it opened big, but the confused, hybrid narrative alienated desi audiences so much that the collections plummeted as soon as the first weekend was over.The high pricing of the film led to the distributors crying buckets.
10. Ajooba (1991)
Shashi Kapoor directed (along with Russian filmmaker Gennadi Vasilyev) his long time collaborator and friend Amitabh Bachchan in Ajooba (1991), a superhero epic with bizarre costumes and melodramatic gregariousness, powered by a lot of money. The Indo-Russian production turned out to be a brutal tragedy despite a star studded cast, and hit producer Shashi very badly.
(The writer is a journalist and screenwriter who believes in the insanity of words, in print or otherwise.)
Twitter - @RanjibMazumder
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