Good dates to release movies are usually when there is a festival or a holiday that is connected to a weekend. Since a movie’s fortunes are decided more or less in the first three or four days, an extra holiday has a huge impact. 
The result of this phenomenon is that that there is a huge crowd of filmmakers vying for those dates during the year to release their movies. These premium periods are often garnered by the big stars and whether there are other movies also releasing depends on who wants to take a risk by going against each other. 
Last year, the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Dilwale and the Ranveer Singh-Deepika Padukone starrer Bajirao Mastani released on the same date and everyone was surprised when the latter did much better. For Sanjay Leela Bhansali, the director of Bajirao Mastani, the risk paid off even if he had a Shah Rukh movie to contend with. 
The coming Friday will see yet another big clash because the Independence Day holiday falls on August 15. After the three Khans, the biggest stars of Bollywood are Akshay Kumar and Hrithik Roshan. And it is their movies — Hrithik’s Mohenjo Daro and Akshay’s Rustom — that are going to woo the audience simultaneously.  
It will be interesting to see which one does more business because that will be seen as an indication of who is more popular. Already, there has been a minor controversy related to the clash. Salman Khan recently put up a video on social networking asking for people to go and see Rustom. 
Ranveer Singh too promoted Rustom on Twitter even putting up a small spoof video of himself dressed like Akshay’s navy officer character in the movie.  While that might be all in good cheer, it obviously raised the question of why no one was doing such friendly publicity for Mohenjo Daro. 
One gossip column even mentioned that Hrithik was not too pleased at this favouritism. But, in the end, these things don’t actually make or break a movie since it has to stand on its own strength. And both Rustom and Mohenjo Daro are unusually themed, one is a thriller based on a famous Indian criminal case while the other is a historical period piece. It is anybody’s guess who comes up trumps. 
Another interesting news about Hrithik is also making the rounds. He had done a remake of Agneepath, the hit Amitabh Bachchan movie of 1990. And now he is said be doing another Amitabh cult movie of the same era, Shahenshah. That is a movie most people would consider a safe bet to be a hit, given the Agneepath experience. 


Tagging along


Katrina Kaif has much riding on her next film, Baar Baar Dekho, after her last film Fitoor, which was a debacle. A few things going in her favour is that she is cast opposite Sidharth Malhotra who is having a very good run at the box office. 
Also the movie is co-produced by Karan Johar and he has a good sense of what makes a movie tick. People are also commenting on how good she is looking in the movie and according to one report her break up with Ranbir Kapoor might have something to do with it. 
Because when asked how she was dealing with it, Katrina had snapped back that she went to the gym and did crunches. But, quite strangely, Ranbir might be tagging along in some form with her movie. Karan Johar is also directing Ae Dil Hai Mushkil, a film starring Ranbir which is going to be released in October, and if media reports are to be believed, its trailer is going to be out and will be screened along with Baar Baar Dekho in movie halls. 
So Katrina and Ranbir will finally share screen space together even if they don’t appear in the same frame!


Snappy meet


Stardom can lead to a great deal of temperamental behaviour because one of the advantages of great fame is that people tolerate all manner of whims and fancies. But it is not very wise to carry on the same kind of attitude once a star is well past his or her peak because then all it leads to is just bad press. 
Ameesha Patel, who used to be an A-list actress many many years ago, did just that recently. She was shooting for a movie Bhaiyyajji Superhitt, when journalists walked in for a media interaction called by the producer. 
Apparently, it turns out, no one had informed Ameesha and she found herself in a bad mood. First when a reporter addressed her as Ameesha, she asked him to add a ‘ji’ to the name, an honorific of respect. To another innocuous question on why she had not been seen in any movie for so long, she retorted that the questioner wasn’t using his brains or he would have figured out that she had been setting up a production house and that is a full time job! 




A painter too 


Early September will see the release of Akira, in which Sonakshi Sinha plays the central character. It is an action movie and is directed by AR Murugadoss, who made Ghajini earlier with Aamir Khan. If the movie becomes a hit then Sonakshi will once again reinforce her place as an A-list star. 
She became the subject of a rather curious controversy recently. She is reportedly in a relationship with Bunty Sajdeh, who is Sohail Khan’s brother in law. They had in fact been seeing each other earlier but had split and recently it was said that they were back to being together again. 
In any case, Sonakshi went for his mother’s birthday celebration and images of the event got out in social networking. A newspaper reported that Sonakshi had been having a sleepover at Sajdeh’s place. It seems to have infuriated her. Because she took to Twitter to write that it had just been a regular dinner at a restaurant. Meanwhile, another aspect of hers was also revealed recently, when Sonakshi put up a painting that she had done to be auctioned online. The proceeds were to go for charity. 


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