PATHAAN has smashed records at the box office and it should put into no doubt who are the superstars of INDIA are. The film confirms the box office clout of Shah Rukh Khan which had not gone anywhere despite the last decade not being as kind as the decade before. There was a box office change towards the end of 2000-2010 decade where digital prints allowed far wider releases on day one and as this process got bigger and bigger, it meant the genre which was the forte of Shah Rukh Khan was never going to get record numbers. But through the 2010-2020 decade, the numbers coming with films which were not action films were still huge.

PATHAAN had a guest role for Salman Khan and the public response has to seen to be believed and this should be enough for the naysayers who have appeared due to his last few films not doing as well as expected. Stardom does not disappear with a few films failing at the box office, just like it does not come overnight and takes many films to establish.

The Hindi film industry is probably the most secular place there is in India but the fact that the biggest stars of India over the last two decades are Muslim has not sat well in some quarters of the country and the media over the last few years. In fact the third biggest also with Aamir Khan though this is arguable with Hrithik Roshan and Akshay Kumar in the fold as well. The cinema going audience does not care one bit about religion and within the industry, nobody notices the religion baring when things get bought up from the outside. There are these non secular voices also within the industry but the way the industry has functioned for decades, these people soon become outcasts and work will just dry up.

The last few years has seen this Pan India thing pop up so you have regional stars names being put up as the biggest superstars of the country, laughable as it may seem. There are no doubt some great directors in the Southern industries and so, it is possible their films can do well in the Hindi belts but that hardly means the actors in these films become stars and superstardom is far away except for the regional one which they probably have already..

India has seen seven stars achieve megastardom and two of them are Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan. The others being Dilip Kumar, Rajendra Kumar, Dharmendra, Rajesh Khanna and Amitabh Bachchan. There is not one name in sight from regional film industries and yet today you see names like Prabhas, Yash, Allu Arjun and others put up with there with two superstars who are not only the biggest superstars of the day but among the biggest ever. 

This is not to say that someone from the regional industry cannot become a huge superstar tomorrow because if the public takes to you then anything can happen. But to reach the level of above names will take some doing not only for the regional stars but even for Hindi film stars.

The simple reason why the the big superstars have come from the Hindi film industry is because the language has a wider reach. If other languages had a reach as wide as Hindi, then maybe it would be a different story. Yes movies can be dubbed but that is the film reaching out and not the actor.

Basically the negativity towards the Hindi film industry has led to many claims as to which is the biggest film industry and who are the biggest stars and when the national media is like this you get the regional one badmouthing Hindi cinema as and pushing their own which is natural. But at the end of the day, nothing much has changed despite the claims as the HINDI film industry easily remains the biggest film industry in India as content may go wrong but that does not change the reach. As for the stars, Salman Khan and Shah Rukh Khan remain the biggest stars in India and that does not look like changing for sometime yet even though the star power may not be as big as it was other points in their careers.