Dear Bollywood, Why Are You Suddenly So Obsessed With Sports-Based Films?

Bollywood has this weird habit of catching up a trend and then chasing it until people get bored of it. Just take this example of remaking the popular iconic songs. Within last two years, we have seen ample of remakes, so much so, that it is scary that we will run out of the skills of making the original music after a certain point of time. Now, the latest obsession of the Bollywood makers is films based on sports personalities.

First of all, there is no harm in making a film on these inspirational personalities in the field of sports. After all, how would we know their journey otherwise, unless we pick up books written on them or dig through the reading material online? Filmmakers do a wonderful job of wrapping the path-breaking journey with a glamorous, nerve-chilling presentation.

However, the rate at which this beat is rigorously followed in the past few years or upcoming ones, it is surprising. Were there no sports personalities a decade ago? From where does this sudden need to portray the lives of sports personalities come from? If we you go through the past movies and the arriving ones, they almost have a few common factors. The film goes through a similar graph of a small-town representation, a tragedy, an inspirational scene, the struggle and the victorious climax. Same story, different execution.

With this new formula, lately cracked by the filmmakers across the industry, we got a few ‘much-loved’ and ‘box office shattering’ biopics. Sports-based films like MS Dhoni: The Untold Story, Dangal, Soorma, Mary Kom to name a few, have followed a similar pathway. They all were interesting, no doubt. However, bombarding the audience with the bunch of these flicks takes away the charm, the motivation and the gist of it. Sunny Leone, Sanjay Dutt and Now Shakeela -- Are Bollywood Filmmakers Deliberately Cashing in On Controversial Celebs For Biopics?

After Akshay Kumar’s recent film Gold, again a film on Hockey, there are more to follow the suit. Shraddha Kapoor’s Saina Nehwal Biopic, Ranveer Singh’s ‘83’ based on Kapil Dev and Shahid Kapoor’s biopic on boxer Dingko Singh are already lined up. While trying their hands on this fixed formula with sports films, is Bollywood missing on the other unattended, interesting beats, incidents and circumstances happening around?

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on Aug 30, 2018 11:14 AM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).