Thursday, June 19 2025
Shah Rukh Khan did not become a superstar because of marketing. Outside of his box office success, what made him a favorite of the masses was that he seemed genuine.
Shah Rukh Khan made his debut with Deewana on this day back in 1992. He tasted box office success almost immediately with Baazigar and Darr the following year. Within a few years, he was the undisputed leader of the Hindi film industry. Over the next decade and a half, he worked his Midas touch, delivering multiple hits almost every year and consistently setting new benchmarks for box office successes. In the last decade, the hits have dried up somewhat and that has been Shah Rukh’s failing for sure. But the film industry has been unable to fill the void he left at the top, and that has been Bollywood’s fault.
Shah Rukh’s peak as the ‘King of Bollywood’ lasted roughly from the mid-1990s to the late 2000s. His superstardom roughly began a few years after Amitab’s reign at the top, who had himself taken over from Rajesh Khanna. In fact, one can trace back an almost unbroken chain of the number-one heroes of Bollywood till Dilip Kumar in the late 1940s. Since then, the last ten years have been the longest when there has been no clear-cut ‘superstar’ in Hindi cinema.
