“I’ve never seen as much negativity towards a film in the trade as towards my Tees Maar Khan,” rued Farah Khan on the day of its release.“Why are they doing this to me?”, she lamented. She had a point. Smses, condemning the Rs. 60 crore film, were doing the rounds in trade circles since Thursday. Social networking websites were also full of messages posted about how the film stood no chance at the box-office. Whether the messages originated in the trade or in the public is not known. One is speculating that the public may have started the hate-campaign against the film because although the public in India had not seen the film before Friday, it had opened abroad on Wednesday itself. And since negative comments multiply faster, more and more people got into the game of taking potshots at the film by forwarding the negative messages and adding their two bits to them.
While ‘Tees Maar Khan‘ is not the first film to have been disliked by the trade and the public, the negative comments one got to hear about it before and on the day of release were unprecedented. Compared to the adverse reports, the first day’s nett collections of around Rs. 12.50 crore were remarkable.
Why was the trade so pessimistic about the eagerly awaited film? Agreed, the trade people may not have found Farah’s film to their liking but this wasn’t the first time the trade had given a film the thumbs down. What, probably, went against the film, more than the trade reports, was the vulnerable position in which its hero, Akshay Kumar, and its director, Farah Khan, were on the eve of release. Akshay, as everybody knows, has had a bad phase which was underlined by the bombing of his last release, Action Replayy.Farah Khan was perceived to be in a shaky position because Shah Rukh Khan, the hero of her first two films, was not a part of this film. With two important people associated with the film being so vulnerable, it must have given the trade a great feeling to pull their spirits down by bad-mouthing the film. With the trade loving to belittle people in shaky or sticky situations – and Akshay Kumar and Farah Khan together must have appeared like prey waiting to be devoured.
