Call it kismet, irony or whatever – but even Sanjay Dutt couldn’t have known that the biggest hit of his career would be a film he does not star him. A . A film that he would ‘make’ with the help of a director friend, who also happens to be the one with the single-largest box office clout in Bollywood today. Sanju has managed what Sanjay Dutt couldn’t accomplish in a career spanning nearly four decades. It’s been only a week since Rajkumar Hirani’s film released, and it has annihilated every possible record in sight and stormed its way into the 200-crore club.
Some of the biggest successes in Sanjay Dutt’s career like Naam, Sadak and Saajan, were huge in the late 1980s and early 1990s. But they were nowhere in the same galaxy as Hirani’s films after 3 Idiots. Dutt has hardly ever been considered a bankable superstar or a reputed actor. The closest he’s been to widespread acclaim, is during his Khalnayak days (coinciding with his links to the ’93 bomb blasts) and his days as Murali Prasad Sharma a.k.a Munnabhai. Dutt saw his biggest success with Hirani in 2006’s Lage Raho Munnabhai.
Dutt’s last ‘hit’ film where he was a lead actor, was Lage Raho Munnabhai. He’s had the odd Agneepath or Son of Sardaar, but they were multi-starrers where he shared the load of the film with the likes of Hrithik Roshan and Ajay Devgn respectively. Out of his last 20 films in the last decade, Dutt has starred in 7 ‘flops’ and 9 ‘disasters’. So why is Bollywood so bullish on him? He will next be seen in Karan Johar’s Kalank, where he will share screen space with rumoured once-upon-a-time-flame Madhuri Dixit.
When Dutt approached Raju Hirani for his own biopic, the best case scenario he was probably hoping for was to clear his name. This insane amount of money, that he never saw for a film of his own, is a bonus.
