Oh dear. I suspect people will have strong emotions about this news. I know I did! That strong emotion being “oh please don’t make me watch this movie!”
Now, let us first all take a deep breath and calm down. There is no indication that Alia and Salman will be a romantic pair. Remember we all freaked out a bit about that with Dear Zindagi and then it turned out to be a completely appropriate relationship between them? More likely Salman and Alia are playing father and daughter or something else similar.
All we know right now is three things:
- Bhansali is seriously planning another film
- Salman is working in a Bhansali film again
- Alia has signed another major movie
As someone who really doesn’t like Bhansali, I am not thrilled by these things. I don’t like any Bhansali movies (except Khamoshi), and I was so happy when he was still “thinking” and didn’t have a new movie officially in the works. I don’t think he is a good director for Salman, he lets Salman slide and just do faces and stuff instead of really acting. And Alia is somehow in YET ANOTHER major film. This means she has Kalank, Brahmastra, and now this movie. Plus Sadak 2. I just don’t think she can be that good in that many films. And also, isn’t there ANY other actress in the world to play this part?
But, you know, the news isn’t all bad. Here’s something to make you smile! Shraddha Kapoor has been dropped from the Saina Nehwal biopic and replaced by Parineeta. YAAAAY! Happiness.
Oh, and the title of the SLB film is “Inshallah” which makes it possible that it is set in the Muslim community instead of making Muslims into subhuman monsters. That also makes me happy!
dontcallitbollywood 
Utterly disgusting!! I hope this is a huge disaster.
I do not think Salman will ever agree to play Alia’s father. The guy is emotionally stunted and won’t marry in real life either to maintain his faux-youth. His fan base won’t accept him openly playing such an aged role.
Just look at how old and out of shape he looks and he’s doing a movie opposite Alia. Omg. I just can’t. https://www.instagram.com/p/BvKoJtoDApW/
Also, is this how it’s going to be from now? Should other actresses just retire now? Alia is in every big movie releasing. Every holiday, we get to see baby Alia’s face.
LikeLike
Maybe he will be her wise guardian/guide? A combination of Shahrukh in Dear Zindagi and Amitabh in Thugs?
LikeLike
What if it’s something like Cheeni Kum, where the age difference is part of the point?
LikeLike
I don’t trust SLB to do a subtle commentary like Cheeni Kum, but I guess I could see something like an old powerful king needs a new young wife and then they slowly come to love each other. The 30 year age difference isn’t unheard of in historical couples, right?
Or else it is the Dilip Kumar-Saira Banu biopic I have been dying for, that would work too.
LikeLike
Salman playing Dilip Kumar?!!! Please don’t scare me. I’ll have to give up BW for good.
LikeLike
And don’t forget she also has the Rajamouli film and Takht too. She really is just hording riches, but that’s fine with me. She hasn’t let me down in anything yet…but overexposure is definitely a thing and it can backfire fast.
This new SLB better be a father/daughter story, that’s all I can say. There is the precedent of Black for an older actor/younger actress film (though that plot took a turn at some point that skeeved me out). Alia’s great, but why not take a chance on Sara or Janhvi or another young or young looking actress.
LikeLiked by 1 person
Although there is also the precedent of Saawariya for much older Salman and much younger actress.
I keep waiting for her to have a film where she isn’t the main person. Kalank and Takht and the Rajamouli film have the possibility of that, Alia just having 20 minutes of screen time in the middle of everyone else, but I thought the same thing about Gully Boy and then she turned out to be a co-lead more than just a “love interest”.
LikeLike
Alia is doing more movies than the ones you listed. She has Takht, Kalank, Bhramasthra, the next Rajamouli movie RRR, Sadak 2, and Arunima Sinha’s biopic (Everest mountaineer who became an amputee). It’s Alia’s world and we’re just living in it.
Unlike the others, Inshallah sounds like a disaster from the get go. Salman can’t act first of all. It was okay in Khamoshi because there was another male lead with a big role (Nana Patekar) and Salman was just a supporting actor. In HDDCS, Ajay Devgan could do the heavy lifting. In both movies, it was okay for Salman to come in and do his usual dopey stuff and leave the acting to others. He is the actual lead in this one and looks like a grandpa compared to the female lead to top it off.
LikeLike
I think Salman can act, he just needs a really strong director to force him to. And SLB is NOT that director. He is good with giving you a basic template for a character and letting you take off and create your own thing, or with giving very specific directions to create a beautiful image, but he can’t do the directing Salman needs that combines an emotional depth with scene by scene details. Salman in Tere Naam and Bajrangi Bhaijaan and other movies I am blanking on at the moment is really really good.
LikeLike
LOL being honest I’m more sad than happy for this Saina Nehwal biopic news. I just can’t stand Parineeti. I think Shradha is terrible actress, but at least she tries. Parineeti on the other hand let go completely. She found her perfect smile and angle and that’s it, she desn’t try to act or do something anymore. I don’t understand why she still works
And this is also important, Shradha does movies I’m not interested watching like Baaghi, all those dance films, Haseena Parker. Parineeti works in better movies, and unfortunately in all those rom-coms I would like to watch. She ruined Meri Pyaari Bindu, Namaste England, and now two other colorful romantic movies will be released which look like fun but I won’t watch, because she is in them.
Salman – Alia pairing. I’m not even angry anymore. I’m mean and I hope they will be playing love interests because I enjoy reading people’s reactions in internet.
LikeLiked by 2 people
I love this thinking. Let’s hope SLB does romantically pair them and then it leads to such a backlash that it ends that practice for good!
LikeLike
I really love this thinking as well. It would be so great is this causes so much backlash with the ICK factor, that directors stop pairing men with women that are nearly 30 years younger! Also, apparently, once the news of the pairing was out, the picture of Salman with baby Alia has been trending on twitter. See following artcile: https://www.hindustantimes.com/bollywood/inshallah-twitter-digs-up-salman-khan-s-pic-with-a-baby-alia-bhatt-as-sanjay-leela-bhansali-announces-film/story-TJMtLYOEW0QeZl4bQB4IBL.html.
LikeLike
You are so mean! But yes, it is fun sometimes to watch the internet freak out.
What’s odd to me is that the supposed reason for the Shraddha-Pari casting switch is that Shraddha wasn’t working hard enough. They tested her badminton skills and did not find her convincing, despite her supposed to be in training and stuff. I just can’t imagine Pari working harder than Shraddha on something as boring as badminton training in preparation for a film. She’s got less films in her lap that she has to work on, but there’s no other reason she would be better at badminton than Shraddha.
LikeLike
The thing I find astonishing is that my Twitter timeline isn’t filled with comments about how disgusting and repulsive it is to pair someone as old as Salman with someone as young as Alia. I DO remember everyone’s freakout at the possibility that Shah Rukh and Alia would be romantically paired in DZ (and, thankfully, they weren’t) and I am truly surprised not to see that with SK-
Alia. At least not yet.
And I’ll admit that my first thought upon reading about the SLB film was thank God it isn’t Shah Rukh. Because he’d be skewered.
LikeLike
I had the same thought, except instead it was “Thank God it isn’t SRK, because then I would definitely have to watch this movie and I really don’t want to”.
LikeLike
After playing child-woman characters who are peone to emotional outbursts,Alia seems to have moved to phase 2 of conquer Bollywood. Playing princess/queen in a period film complete with Kathak dancing, lead role in a senior Khan film are all next level steps.Only question is why is she in a hurry to finish all the milestones that other actresses took years to achieve.What will she do once she does everything that Deepika Padukone & Madhuri Dixit has done? At the speed that she is at, Hollywood debut & marriage to Ranbir can be expected in a year. Then what?
Also unrelated qn-why hasn’t Deepika ever worked with Salman?
LikeLike
Maybe she is planning on the “Kapoor women don’t work” rule? So she only has until she is 25 to do everything, and then she marries and raises kids. Like her mother-in-law before her.
No idea why Dips hasn’t worked with Salman! She hasn’t worked with Aamir either, but then he works a lot less so it is less surprising. Maybe she just isn’t willing to take the usual boring heroine parts? So when she reached the “Khan heroine” level in her career, she did a couple films with Shahrukh for old times’ sake but otherwise avoided those kind of roles and opted for more female lead pictures?
LikeLike
Maybe the fun back story is that Shah Rukh turned down the role BECAUSE he was meant to be the love interest and he a) genuinely feels paternal toward her and it would be weird b) He has understood that his time for being paired with the youngsters is over c) the script was sh—- d) SLB takes too long to make a film and he has (hope hope) other things going on.
I cant imagine Alia will quit. Kareena didn’t; Deepika didn’t and wont…of course I can’t really imagine her married to Ranbir either….
LikeLiked by 1 person
But Alia’s big sister did. Pooja started even younger than Alia, then got sick of acting and switched to directing and producing. I could see Alia wanting to build up credit as an actress as fast as possible while she is young and fresh, so she can use that later as a director/producer/whatever.
On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 12:50 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
>
LikeLiked by 1 person
But Pooja was a young actress in a different time. It wasn’t so common then as now to continue work after marriage, much less having a baby. Anyway, Alia feels too ambitious to me to want to stop, and she says she’s wanted this all her life. Why give it up young if you don’t have to?
LikeLike
I got curious, so I looked it up. Pooja started acting at 18, continued for 8 years until she was 26, then switched to producing, did that for 5 years, then moved into directing. Alia just turned 25, so she has one more year until she reaches the age her sister was when she stopped.
None of this means anything necessarily, it’s just interesting to me that her sister stopped acting so young and chose to pursue other professional challenges instead.
LikeLike
Actually Alia just turned 26 not 25 I think
LikeLike
I am not worried that Salman-Alia will look weird on screen. I’m sure SLB is going to go the DZ way. Infact he had planned Ballika Vadhu with Alia and Ranbir many years ago, so this might be something like that. What I think is unfair is that the other girls aren’t even getting a chance. Alia is every big movie, she doesn’t even have a competitor now.
Saina – I am surprised Parineeti was chosen for this, because she really isn’t the hardest-working person out there. Shradha is def more hardworking, but I guess Shraddha doesn’t want a redux of Haseena Parkar where she had to shoulder the entire movie.
LikeLike
They are saying Shraddha couldn’t do the Badminton, which seems odd to me because she learned how to dance for ABCD2 and we could see how hard she worked onscreen, it wasn’t like it was just a promotional lie for the film. It’s true that Pari has more free time now, because Shraddha seems to be in every film that isn’t good enough for Alia, so I guess it is possible that Pari just has more time to devote to the training, but I also can’t remember ever feeling like she really struggled and worked extra hard to prepare for a film role and I know Shraddha has.
Maybe it is just sour grapes? Maybe Shraddha backed out of the film because she didn’t want to commit that much time and energy to it and it felt like it wasn’t going to turn out well, and now the producers are spreading a story of “she’s lazy and unprepared” in revenge?
On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 3:09 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
>
LikeLike
Pari better not mess this up – I love Saina! Also Shraddha does well in movies where she’s not front and center. Probably only wants to do such movies now where she doesn’t do the heavy lifting. She was terrible in Haseena (from the few minutes I did manage to watch)
LikeLike
We need actresses willing to not be front and center! I’m not saying every heroine needs to be a forgettable side character, but some of them do, and we need actresses willing to play that role. Just like we need Sidharth Malhotra to play the brainless pretty action hero.
On Tue, Mar 19, 2019 at 3:54 PM dontcallitbollywood wrote:
>
LikeLike
Bhansali has said in some interviews after the Alia announcement that this movie is a light happy love story. Repulsive. I think it will flop hard if Alia and Salman are paired together. This is gonna look worse than that time he paired up with Sneha Ullal.
LikeLike
I kind of love Lucky: No Time For Love. But that was 14 years ago, when Salman was only 38. I could still kind of squint and see him as the college hero he was supposed to be playing. No way he can pull that off now.
LikeLike
More about this upcoming disaster –
#Inshallah is a “modern love story” majorly set “abroad” mostly in the European countries. Both, @BeingSalmanKhan and @aliaa08 play the most special character of their career in this romance saga . #SanjayLeelaBhansali promises it belongs to a happy space and will celebrate life.
LikeLike
I still have hope! Salman could be her older brother/guardian or something.
Also, when was the last time SLB did something modern? Was it HDDCS?
LikeLike
I’m actually more bothered about the fact that all of the big films are going to the same actress. How is it even a film industry?? I wish Bollywood would open their eyes to other people the way new people in Hollywood come up all the time like Jennifer Lawrence, Emma Stone, Lupita all came out of nowhere and proved to be great. I’m sure there are talented actresses at acting institutes and theatre programs across India. I know that Bollywood has somewhat specific beauty standards but I’m sure there are some women who do have that “actress” look. I know that the directors think from a business perspective and want to bring in the person who brings the most money but if Hollywood kept casting the same big names, the industry wouldn’t grow. I like that Elle Fanning for instance gets work and gets noticed even though the directors could choose Emma Watson who would obviously bring in a huge crowd to watch the movie but shes obviously not a good actress. So they go for quality and pick Elle Fanning or Saoirse Ronan or Rooney Mara someone else talented. May not bring in a huge crowd like Emma Watson but they bring talent. India needs to find those types of girls out there and stop relying on like just their Emma Watson and Kristen Stewart. And I say this all as an Indian haha (born and raised in the US though)
LikeLiked by 2 people
I don’t know, I get anxious with the Hollywood comparison because so many of those actresses were Weinstein discoveries. So it was less about the industry as a whole being welcoming to new talent, and more about one man having a thing for very young actresses and picking a new one to pursue every year.
At least YRF is holding firm against Alia. Probably because they want to control their stars and not let their stars control them (unless it is someone really really big like a Khan). So at least the YRF releases next year will be Alia-free.
LikeLike
It is looking more like kjo lobbying hard to make alia as a 1 stop actress for all big movies.
Rajamouli could have taken ang actress from South bt kjo forced alia on him based on friendship.
He is taking all the good directors and in the guise of producing (meghna ) or marketing ( zoya ) or showing pan India appeal (rajamouli ) inserting alia in all the movies.
LikeLiked by 1 person
It is looking more like kjo lobbying hard to make alia as a 1 stop actress for all big movies.
Rajamouli could have taken ang actress from South bt kjo forced alia on him based on friendship.
He is taking all the good directors and in the guise of producing (meghna ) or marketing ( zoya ) or showing pan India appeal (rajamouli ) inserting alia in all the movies.
A.s the dharma directors (kala k ,bramhastra etc) don’t have any option bt to take her.
LikeLike
Thing is, Alia initially rejected RRR as she didn’t think she had time on her schedule. I heard that there were whispers among the producers about the part going to another actress (supposedly Parineeti, but don’t quote me on that), but Rajamouli was firm on wanting Alia, and even upped her renumeration so she’d say yes.
I don’t know how much of the above story is true, but didn’t Rajamouli have positive things to say about Alia on KwK? Can anyone remember what it was, exactly?
LikeLiked by 1 person
I guess we will have to see, it’s possible out of all the roles she is taking, this is the one that is truly perfect for her and no one else and that is why he wanted her.
LikeLike
You changed my opinion about Alia in RRR with this one sentence about Parineeti. I’m not Alia’s fan, but she can act and now I’m perfectly ok with her in this movie. Thank you 🙂
LikeLike
parineeti is very talented actually. I am not sure if you have seen ishaqzaade, she was so good in that.
alia is not the only actress who can act.
LikeLike
I’m always surprised at how many movies and actors I’ve never heard of…we just see the very biggest.
LikeLike