Edited By: Yatamanyu Narain
Last Updated: January 16, 2023, 20:25 IST
Bhushan Kumar calls out actors who charge hefty amounts as fees.
After Karan Johar, Bhushan Kumar has slammed actors who charge hefty amounts as fees and couldn’t guarantee profits at the box office.
Big-budgeted Bollywood films even with the most potent of star cast have been struggling to mint money at the box office. Whether it was Aamir Khan’s Laal Singh Chaddha or Akshay Kumar’s Samrat Prithviraj, there was a slew of highly-anticipated films that didn’t garner the buzz that the makers had sought. While the trade pundits have been trying their best to figure out the reason behind this lull, filmmakers like Karan Johar had weighed that stars charging an exorbitant fee for a single film is a major part of the problem. Now T-Series flag bearer and producer Bhushan Kumar have echoed the same thoughts.
In a recent interaction with the entertainment portal PinkVilla, when Bhushan Kumar was asked about his take on how should an actor go about charging fees for a film and whether Bollywood actors have learnt something from the box office debacles, the producer explained, “Lekin abhi still some actors are there, who say ki ‘nahi, hum toh itna hi lenge, warna nahi karenge.’ Toh hum unke saath nahi kar rahe. Hum unko bol rahe hain, ‘mat karo, we also don’t want to do.’ Hum nuksan ke liye kyu karenge? So many people have suffered losses in big films and we have seen that. So why we should give you money and we suffer loss, and you earn such a big amount? Ki aap ₹20 crore, 25 crore lelo and hum nuksaan kare film.(Still now there are some actors who say things like, ‘We will charge this amount or we won’t work.’ So, we are not working with them, we are saying ‘its fine, don’t do it then.’ Why should be give in to losses?… That you charge ₹20 crores 25 crores, and we will suffer the losses with the film)”
He further added, “In which we are also earning, the project is also safe, the project is not becoming heavy. But jahaa pe project aapka cost itni cost nahi le sakta, waha pe hum actors se baat kar rahe hai(film…When the question comes to a project that is small and cannot take the cost that large, there we are in talks with the actor).”
For the unversed, Bhushan Kumar produced Kartik Aaryan’s film Bhool Bhulaiya 2 which was among the few rare films that had profited at the box office in 2022 had opened a debate about star fees and whether that factor acts as a deterrent to the budget of a movie and whether it translates into profits for the producers.
