Sequels Rain In, Turn Franchise! 

Besides reinventing the solo action hero from the 1970s era, the latest trend to have caught the fancy of filmmakers in Bollywood is that of making sequels...and how!!. Though making sequels had till now been a primarily Hollywood forte (Jurassic Park, Terminator, Die Hard, Rocky, Rambo), the Hindi film industry has now been bitten by the sequel bug too, considering the unprecedented flood of sequels that are hitting the market lately.

Though it would be unfair to say that the trend of making sequels in Bollywood is a recent one. Not many people know that the honour of the first Hindi film to have its own sequel goes to the 1965 movie Johar Mehmood in Goa which was followed by Johar Mehmood in Hong Kong in 1971 and both comic capers had the comedian duo I.S Johar and Mehmood making the audiences hold their sides in uncontrolled mirth with their howlarious antics. Then to hit the screens was the Sridevi starrer Nagina, which was released in 1986 and was followed by a sequel titled Nigahen in 1989 where Sridevi as a vengeful serpent played the protagonist. However, at the time, there was not much of a market for sequels and it was many decades later that filmmakers struck on the idea of reinventing the sequel trend.


The year that spawned the maximum number of Hindi movie sequels was probably 2006. Sequels of many previous hits like Dhoom, Hera Pheri, Koi Mil Gaya and Munnabhai MBBS were released a few months apart from each other in the same year and all the sequels to the aforementioned flicks were a great success at the box office. Thereafter, every director and his uncle jumped on the sequel bandwagon and started setting registers ringing at the box office. Though Lage Raho Munnabhai where Sanjay Dutt reprises the role of the golden-hearted goon 'Munna' and Arshad Warsi plays his comic sidekick 'Circuit' was not considered a sequel in the real sense as the plot did not continue that of the original, it was well received by the public. Same was the case with Murder 2, which had the same male lead viz. Bhatt camp favourite Emraan Hashmi but that was where the similarity ended. The storyline and the rest of the cast in the sequel was completely different from the original and a new term 'series' or 'franchise' was coined to justify using a popular brand name for a film which had little or nothing to do with the original. Rohit Shetty's Golmaal series is probably the best example of this trend and Shetty went on to make three hit movies in the comic series.