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Bollywood has in general made very few films which cater to the younger set of audience or deals with stories about kids. At least commercially, such films are a rarity. One such film was Taare Zameen Par, which undoubtedly raised the bar pretty high. However, what if we tell you that this film might have been made so well since it was an open challenge thrown at Aamir Khan by none other than Amitabh Bachchan?
Taare Zameen Par was a December release, and it clashed with Akshay Kumar’s Welcome at the Box Office in 2007. Still, the film earned well and collected around 62.5 crore. This number was not much behind Welcome, which collected 71.25 crore at the box office. While the former finished number in the highest-grossers list that year, the latter finished fourth.
However, this box office battle is not between these two films that clashed. It is between two superstars, where one could not mince words while criticizing, and the other could not handle the criticism. It was about Amitabh Bachchan‘s Black and Aamir Khan’s Taare Zameen Par.
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It all started when the PK actor was working on TZP. It was at that time when he watched Sanjay Leela Bhansali‘s Black and criticized the film. But the words he chose were sharp, and it felt like he was attacking the film. In an interview with Mumbai Mirror, the Dangal actor said, “I thought I was watching a rip off of Taming Of The Shrew! I take great exception to this kind of behavior towards children being glorified and propagated through a popular mass medium as the way to deal with children with or without difficulties. I, without any hesitation, strongly condemn this kind of cinema no matter who is involved with the film, and that includes me if I ever have in the past, present, or future made such an error of judgment.”
Aamir Khan did not stop there. He later questioned the sensibility of ‘Black,’ which, by the way, made Amitabh Bachchan win a National Award for his performance. Aamir even questioned how the story could convincingly pass an alcoholic man coming and asking a family to leave their deaf-dumb female child with him for forty days, and no one questioned. Neither the parents in the film nor the audience. He even pointed out how problematic it was for him to watch the man keep slapping the poor girl around.
Later, when this strong set of words reached Amitabh Bachchan, he was furious and openly challenged his Thugs of Hindostan co-star through an interview with Mid Day. The Brahmastra actor said, “If Aamir is unhappy with this, let him demonstrate otherwise. I would be keen and anxious to educate myself on any prospective change that he might introduce to cinema.”
Amitabh Bachchan even went ahead and criticized Aamir Khan’s films Fanaa and Lagaan, where he ditched sensitivity while portraying a blind girl and a handicapped, respectively!
But guess what? Aamir Khan probably took the challenge to his heart. While Black, released in the year 2005, collected only 23.3 crore at the Box Office, Taare Zameen Par earned almost 168% higher at the box office two years later despite facing a clash with a comedy film led by Akshay Kumar.
Well, we clearly think Aamir Khan won this challenge brilliantly, and while the two films cannot be compared, any one of us would go for Taare Zameen Par over Black any day. Which team would you be?
Note: Box office numbers are based on estimates and various sources. Numbers have not been independently verified by Koimoi.
Check out the latest box office verdict and numbers here.
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