02-07-2025
Southern cinema still sizzles with age-old glamour
At an age when stars of the earlier era were either sent packing or decided to move away from the limelight to foray into politics, in sharp contrast, the modern day 60 - and beyond matinee idols in south India still seem to be in great demand. Across the country, Amitabh Bachchan at 82 may not be the 'one-man industry' he was four decades back but he has enough on his plate to make him rise and shine on a daily basis. His juniors, who began a few years later in the distant peninsula have done much better. They still command huge salaries, have the best banners tying up with them on a consistent basis, dabble in all genres – from sci-fi to socio-political dramas – and have young heroines, as old as their daughters, jive with them in dream locations across the world. Herogiri for them thus is a permanent occupation, one surmises.
From the most popular Kamal-Rajini duo in Tamil cinema, Mohanlal- Mammootty in Malayalam, the lone ranger Shivaraj Kumar in Kannada to the quartet of Chiranjeevi- Venkatesh-Nagarjuna and Balakrishna in mana Telugu states, none seems to be wanting to stay away from the greasepaint and glamour of moviedom. Even as in the last 15 years, these stars touched the senior citizen status but continued to churn out their staple fare for their fans, spread across three generations. The box-office response may not have always been kind as also the reactions of the hyperactive social media, which has captured the central spot in determining how the initial weekend of the film's performance, post-release would pan out. Yet, all these heroes are fighting fit to stay in the race with their younger counterparts, who have had to share their directors and tech teams with them, not to speak of the glamour girls, who don't mind being labelled an old man's girl by the cheeky new gen.
Huge budgets running into hundreds of crores are avowedly invested in shaping up the celluloid creations of these titans, who still retain maximum screen space and the best of the scenes to keep their fans as excited as ever. Rather brazenly many of them justify the ordinary storylines their films are made of, even going to the extent of making their ventures as multi-starrers, to further derisk the project and keep the production houses this arrangement has suited only these 10-odd vintage heroes of southern cinema.
The directors with whom they had given many blockbusters earlier are not given such comfortable timelines to stay the course in cinema if their films bomb at the box-office. The recent examples of directors like showman Shankar and methodical Mani Ratnam, who overestimated their potential and delivered massive duds featuring these stars is a case in point.
Even if it is a derated, diluted version of their carefully- crafted onscreen persona, these heroes seem content staying in that ecosystem hardly venturing out to try experimental or experiential cinema.
With the total chain of business, dreaming of profit from these movies, like satellite channels, digital media and the ever-growing chain of multiplexes, these legends are cogs in the giant wheel of entertainment and nothing else. The box-office is still their El Dorado, for sure.
