Step aside, Shah Rukh Khan: who are Bollywood’s 10 hottest stars on Instagram?
A recently married power couple makes the list – but is it Priyanka Chopra and husband Nick Jonas or Ranveer Singh and Deepika Padukone? Read on to find out
Bollywood has been on a desperate hunt for the next superstar as box-office guarantees of old fail to deliver.
The Khan hegemony – Aamir Khan (54), Salman Khan (53) and Shah Rukh Khan (53) – no longer have a stranglehold of putting “butts on seats” in cinemas as their latest film releases, despite mammoth budgets, special effects, multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns and good intentions, have barely been able to recover hefty costs.
If you still think of Bollywood as the juggernaut of moustached men and girls in shimmering saris dancing around trees in front of the Taj Mahal, you need another look at what’s really happening in Mumbai’s movie scene. From meticulous biopics of Olympic champions to midgets heading to outer space (oh yes, that was a plot line of a recent release), Hindi films run the gamut, from the truly great to the garrulous. Sure, they are still singing and dancing up a storm, be it on gargantuan film sets (see above) or exotic locales like Mykonos.
In the Bollywood buffet, there’s something for everyone – 202 Hindi films were released in 2018 alone.
Technology, corporatisation and lavish production have changed the game. Big budget films, multimillion-dollar deals are not uncommon as Warner Bros, Walt Disney Pictures, Fox Star Studio and SONY have divisions in Mumbai (capital of the entertainment industry in India), not to forget the recent arrival of Netflix and HBO India, each producing content with leading stars and creating new ones.
Toted as the largest film industry in the world, India has a population of 1.3 billion with only a handful of actors who make it, despite the copious number of Hindi film releases (we aren’t even including regional films that raise the tally to about 1,000 Indian films each year).
Pecuniary film producers are waging their bets on younger stars, often second generation actors, as the establishment is greying. Established stars come in with hefty, non-negotiable price tags and back end deals, cutting the profits of production houses (with no refunds when the movies tank). Hope is strutting in from these social media savvy youngsters. They’re mostly 20-something, have a staggering number of followers online, have lucrative deals (from cosmetics to cola) and the wherewithal to have an entourage that includes managers, agents, personal trainers, stylists and a coterie of assistants to keep their fan base satiated on their every move, meal and make-up deal.
Here are 10 young Bollywood stars who have piqued interest and gained a massive Instagram following:
1. Ayushmann Khurrana, 34 years old, 6.4 million followers