Bollywood gave us several gems in 2014. It gave us the films that everyone loved to hate, such as Youngistaan and Action Jackson, and the not so terrible ones such as Happy New Year and Bang Bang! There are many ways to look back at these movies. One of them is through Akshar Pathak’s posters.
A 25-year-old marketing professional at the restaurant listings website Zomato, Pathak runs Minimal Bollywood Posters, an online collection of posters that reduce Bollywood films to a single concept.
Unlike other popular film review efforts, such as the Vigil Idiot, Pathak does not only review bad films. As an avid film watcher, he makes posters for all the films he sees. He also skips several big names, as he did with Queen and Kick this year.
“What works is the slight touch of humour,” Pathak said. “If the movie is really bad, make fun of it. If it’s good, take something from it.”
Pathak exploded onto the internet in 2012, with his first set of film posters that went viral about a month after he uploaded them. He soon began to post reviews of old and new films alike. “I got excited when people started sharing the posters, so I started pushing them out as fast as I could,” he said.
He put up most of his posters in 2012. By next year, he had run out of old movies to review. Now, he reviews only those flicks he sees in theatres. Minimal Bollywood Posters of 2014 is restricted to 10 films. This minuscule number is a result of Pathak's working life, which does not leave him much time to watch as many films as he might like.
His posters continue to work even after their popularity dipped because of the passionate discussions both livid critics and appreciative fans have on his Facebook and Twitter pages.
“The whole idea behind minimalism is that there is one thing you carry out from the movie theatre,” Pathak said. “So these posters are meant for people who have seen the movies, which works better. Half the time, my posters can only be reviews because they are riddles.”
He had almost let the page die this year when his most successful project of the year, Bhojpuri movie and television posters, began to piggyback on the Game of Thrones viral presence, which doubled his page likes from one lakh to two lakh in two days.
Sparking a debate
There are a few obvious differences between Pathak’s posters and the official ones commissioned by producers. “Producers use posters to get people into cinema halls, which is why they put everything that is in the film on the poster,” Pathak said. “People who discuss my posters on Facebook are also talking about the film and how it was, and why I might have used that element in the poster.”
It takes Pathak only a few minutes to make a poster, but it can take up to a week before he comes up with an idea for it.
“The internet can make you feel like nothing because there are so many people with so much talent,” he said. “After a point, people began to send me their ideas and those were 10,000 times better than mine.”
His favourite film of the year, with which he has a love-hate relationship, was Farah Khan’s Happy New Year. Its climax features Shah Rukh Khan attempting to smuggle diamonds through an airport by passing off diamonds as ice cubes in his drink. The poster for the film has the said drink at the bottom of a trash can.
Here are some posters from his page:
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A 25-year-old marketing professional at the restaurant listings website Zomato, Pathak runs Minimal Bollywood Posters, an online collection of posters that reduce Bollywood films to a single concept.
Unlike other popular film review efforts, such as the Vigil Idiot, Pathak does not only review bad films. As an avid film watcher, he makes posters for all the films he sees. He also skips several big names, as he did with Queen and Kick this year.
“What works is the slight touch of humour,” Pathak said. “If the movie is really bad, make fun of it. If it’s good, take something from it.”
Sudden popularity
Pathak exploded onto the internet in 2012, with his first set of film posters that went viral about a month after he uploaded them. He soon began to post reviews of old and new films alike. “I got excited when people started sharing the posters, so I started pushing them out as fast as I could,” he said.
He put up most of his posters in 2012. By next year, he had run out of old movies to review. Now, he reviews only those flicks he sees in theatres. Minimal Bollywood Posters of 2014 is restricted to 10 films. This minuscule number is a result of Pathak's working life, which does not leave him much time to watch as many films as he might like.
His posters continue to work even after their popularity dipped because of the passionate discussions both livid critics and appreciative fans have on his Facebook and Twitter pages.
“The whole idea behind minimalism is that there is one thing you carry out from the movie theatre,” Pathak said. “So these posters are meant for people who have seen the movies, which works better. Half the time, my posters can only be reviews because they are riddles.”
He had almost let the page die this year when his most successful project of the year, Bhojpuri movie and television posters, began to piggyback on the Game of Thrones viral presence, which doubled his page likes from one lakh to two lakh in two days.
Sparking a debate
There are a few obvious differences between Pathak’s posters and the official ones commissioned by producers. “Producers use posters to get people into cinema halls, which is why they put everything that is in the film on the poster,” Pathak said. “People who discuss my posters on Facebook are also talking about the film and how it was, and why I might have used that element in the poster.”
It takes Pathak only a few minutes to make a poster, but it can take up to a week before he comes up with an idea for it.
“The internet can make you feel like nothing because there are so many people with so much talent,” he said. “After a point, people began to send me their ideas and those were 10,000 times better than mine.”
His favourite film of the year, with which he has a love-hate relationship, was Farah Khan’s Happy New Year. Its climax features Shah Rukh Khan attempting to smuggle diamonds through an airport by passing off diamonds as ice cubes in his drink. The poster for the film has the said drink at the bottom of a trash can.
Here are some posters from his page:
