Shah Rukh is as Shah Rukh does. Even if Aanand L. Rai’s Zero (2018) or Imtiaz Ali’s Jab Harry Met Sejal (2017) didn’t do much for the Bollywood exchequer, four years is too much for the SRK fanverse to not see the actor spreading his arms and some magic on the silver screen with his dimpled smile.
Cut to 2023. Aditya Chopra’s Pathaan hits the screens and goes on to collect Rs700 crore in a span of just ten days. Experts say it’s a simple law of supply and demand. Pathaan had to work. What it additionally did for Yash Raj Films (YRF) was that it saved them a huge marketing cost. The four-year wait added to SRK’s overall brand value was a sure shot crowd puller that YRF knew wouldn’t fail.
Marketing Pathaan was an experiment that had very little chance of failure. It started subtly, but started a long time back.
Keep ’em wanting more
In February 2022, Shah Rukh Khan was seen in Thums Up’s blockbuster commercial, launching the brand’s ‘Soft Drink Nahin, Toofan’ campaign. The long hair, six-pack look and the campaign’s narrative was all aligned with the movie ‘Pathaan’.
“2022 beginning was a comeback for everyone, including Thums up and SRK. The new brand endorsement by SRK was a win-win for both, and if they wanted to start with a ‘toofan’, then the advertising campaign had to be different. SRK’s movie comeback was after four years, and viewers had not been to theatres for the Covid years. The ad was almost a trailer for the movie, and a great curiosity creator,” says N. Chandramouli, CEO of TRA Research, a consumer analytics and brand insights company.
Chandramouli has another interesting observation. According to him, there has been a tremendous sympathy built up for SRK due to the situtaion with his son Aryan Khan and the call for boycotting ‘Pathaan’. All these factors helped in making viewers anticipate watching the movie in the theatres.
Context matters in movie marketing
While the next few years SRK will have his hand full after Pathaan’s success, Chandramouli says the film’s promotion was a matter of circumstance and a stance taken by SRK and the producers.
“I doubt if any other producer will risk lying low for any new movie release,” he says.
“The audience was starved,” says Eman Batliwalla co-founder at content marketing agency By The Gram. According to Batliwalla, the audience was craving SRK’s comeback ever since they saw him as scientist Mohan Bhargav in Ayan Mukerji’s September 2022 release ‘Brahmastra’.
“People wrote to Ayan Mukerji to make a sequel focusing on SRK’s character. The point here being the SRK fan universe which is huge was dying to see the actor in a full-blown film. So while there were no typical marketing initiatives of media interactions, hashtag contests or hook step challenges, there was a very impactful buildup to the actual film release,” she adds.
Seeding Pathaan, a one-time tactic
By buildup Batliwalla points at the actor being hyper-active on social platforms, donning the Pathaan look for over a year, playing cameos in other major releases like Brahmastra and of course YRF’s own videos with the actors for their social platforms.
The audience was titillated. They were curious. They couldn’t wait for Pathaan.
Then came the song drops. With ‘Besharam Rang’ and ‘Jhoome Jo Pathaan’ the audience did what they had to. They made sure the songs went viral.
“While there were no hook step challenges initiated by YRF, a lot of user generated content took over social platforms and helped in creating tremendous last minute buzz for the film. YRK banked on SRK’s brand value and waited for his magic to work on the audience. It did. However, I don’t think SRK will replicate this for ‘Jawan’. This is a one-time thing,” Batliwalla says.
‘Jawan’ is another action thriller film written and directed by Atlee starring Shah Rukh Khan in a dual role. It will be a Red Chillies Entertainment film and is expected to release somewhere around June 2023.
While YRF might not replicate the ‘less is more’ strategy for the upcoming releases, there is one thing that Pathaan had and so will some other films from the production house – the Spy Universe.
Hopping on the Universe bandwagon
“Multi-starrers were missing from Bollywood for some time and it is back with Pathaan and it has been proven that it can work if stars are integrated well in the script and not planted just for the sake of it. Salman Khan’s entry in Pathaan is a contributing factor to the film’s success. The Spy Universe added to the curiosity build up. No one knows whether it will be Hrithik or Salman in the film,” says film trade analyst Atul Mohan.
For the uninitiated, YRF Spy Universe is an Indian universe centered on a series of spy action-thriller films, featuring fictional RAW agents – Tiger (Salman Khan), Kabir (Hrithik Roshan) and now Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan).
There have been other such franchises too in Bollywood like Rohit Shetty’s Cop Universe but it hasn’t had the impact Spy Universe has had, says Mohan.
So, while YRF saved Rs50 crore roughly on traditonal marketing tactics (the typcal marketings spends for films that are budgeted between Rs150 crore and Rs200 crore), they also created a case study on how ‘no-show’ can be used in a positive way to create curiosity and dial up demand.
The result is a mega success at the box office with about Rs700 crore collections and a huge top-up and value add to SRK’s brand.