Liger Trailer Proves Who Kartik Aaryan’s Real Competition Is

The next  blockbuster  after Bhool Bhulaiya 2  is here. And it’s got a  name. Liger, which we are told  is a mix  of a tiger and  a lion. The trailer shows  Vijay Deverakonda in the dual  animalistic tone . He  is in  terrific form as a fighter from the  slums. That his  militant mother is  played  by Ramya Krishnan certainly ensures Liger’s  place in the hall of fame.

Remember  Ramya’s resolve to  make her son the  king of all he surveys in Baahubali? Liger exudes a similar belligerent energy.  Vijay Deverakonda straddles the  crossbred combat  in the boxing ring and  in the larger ring of  life where the slum rules are applied to multiple streetfights.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgcruVx0dNM[/embedyt]

The action in Liger is  of the kind  not seen in Indian cinema  before. Deverakonda  gets into the mood of crushing his  opponents with a vigour and  grace that seldom go hand-in-hand in  our leading man.

I mean, how can you be a steamroller and  Rolls  Royce  at the same  time?!  Vijay Deverakonda  show  us  how.

Liger has many  LOL(Lash Out Lout) moments. The streetsmart  hero  in the ring is not a  new thing. But the fights  in Liger seem to havea sting. While focusing  on the debutant hero’s fighting abilities , Liger also shows  the hero to be vulnerable; Deverakonda plays the  fighter  with a speech disability.

The only time before this when we’ve seen  the  hero  stammering  before  was in Anurag Basu’s  Jagga  Jasoos

Bollywood’s biggest  dream merchant, Karan Johar is thinking South. Recent trends—RR,Pushpa, etc–  indicate seismic changes  at the  boxoffice. Karan’s best friend Aditya Chopra’s  Jayeshbhai Jordaar and Samrat  Prithviraj have bombed  miserably.

And to add insult to injury, Kartik Aaryan, a young  actor from outside the  film industry whom Karan ostracized , is well on the way of becoming the No.1 hero  of  Bollywood, leaving behind all the Dharma  favourites Varun Dhawan,Siddharth Malhotra,etc.

It’s not as  though KJo is  getting jittery or anything. Far from it.  However Karan who has one of the  cleverest  minds in the Indian entertainment industry, is re-strategizing his  production moves, gradually  spreading his wings to the South, to the Telugu film industry to be more  precise, where  all the action is supposed to be.

This movement towards a Dravidian utopia  began  five years ago when Karan tied up with Telugu cinema’s  maverick  S S Rajamouli.  Karan was the sole distributor of  Baahubali in Hindi. Returning the favour, Rajamouli has now taken over  Karan’s beleaguered  over-budget Brahmastra in the South where the  much-troubled project sci-fi  drama  featuring the newly-married Ranbir Kapoor-Alia Bhatt along with Amitabh Bachchan and Nagarjuna, is being projected as  the  next best thing after Rajamouli’s RRR.

Karan’s brain-bank  thought the  novelty of seeing Ranbir and Alia  together  for the first time, and that too after their marriage , would see  the project Brahmastra through at the boxoffice. However trade  experts  are of the opinion that the marriage  would have little lucrative effect  on the film’s boxoffice performance.

That’s where the South tieup came in  for Brahmastra. Not only is Rajamouli the  project’s  anchor in the South, Rajamouli’s father the  respected screenwriter K Vijayendra  Prasad was asked to  salvage the  project by rewriting the climax.

I am  not too sure of the financial arrangement between Karan  Johar and  the father-son duo of Vijayendra Prasad and Rajamouli.  But it is  definitely  a staggering amount; and every penny worth it, as Telugu cinema is where all the action at the Indian boxoffice seems to be happening at the moment.

The latest  on Karan Johar Dharma Production’s  growing association with the South is  that the doyen of  the  Telugu film  industry  Chiranjeevi is also a  part  of Brahmastra, in what capacity, one doesn’t know.

Karan Johar is tightlipped about his plans with Chiranjeevi  vis-à-vis Brahmastra. He is  more open about his exuberant  endorsement  of the other Telugu superstar Vijay Devarakonda who stars in Dharma  Productions full-on action thriller Liger.

Karan feels Devarakonda will be the  next superstar of Hindi cinema. I suspect a  part  of this exuberance comes  from Johar’s  determination to find a competitor for Kartik Aaryan. Whatever his  motives,  Karan is placing a towering  faith in Vijay Devarakonda, inviting the young charming Telugu star to not  only  frontline the slick action film Liger, but two other projects as well , one of which will  apparently  cast Devarakonda with  Karan’s god-daughter Alia Bhatt.

The  South invasion is  not quite  the  leveling force in Bollywood that it is seen to be , not with  Bhoola Bhulaiya 2  showing us that the halcyon  days  of Bollywood are far  from over.

But as  far as  Karan Johar and Dharma Productions are concerned, the Telugu film industry is  the  go-to solution  for the  eruption of  bleakness  in Bollywood.