Filmmaker Karan Johar says the lack of big movie stars in the film industry is a crisis.
“Yes, [it’s a] big problem. 100 movies to make and six of them only that can sell your movie. Suddenly you take anyone else and [people] say ‘you won’t get the budget... then the music won’t sell, overseas won’t sell, satellite won’t sell, digital won’t sell, nothing sells,” Johar said at the launch of a talent recruitment website.
“We’re going through a crisis. There really are [so few] actors who are, in trade parlance, viable, saleable. It is very limiting. We have very few movie stars and I hope the country starts loving more and more stars very soon. And gives them longevity as movie stars so that we can actually have the choice. The way that we used to love our movie stars up to the 1980s... that madness and insanity is definitely depleting with time,” Johar added.
Johar has worked with some of the biggest superstars of the country such as Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Kajol and Kareena Kapoor. But when he was making Student of the Year he went with newcomers Alia Bhatt, Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra, who are now successful actors.
“We definitely have to launch faces. [But] we make films with big budgets, we have to sell them. We are producers at the end of the day. I’m not a corporate studio, I’m not funded internationally, I don’t have that pool of wealth to take that chance with. I need to have a selling face, then work around it.
“When I made Student of the Year, it was a chance I took. Fortunately things worked out but it doesn’t work like that always,” he added.
