This wasn’t the first season of Koffee with Karan (KWK), when we saw Arjun Kapoor try to make sense of his box office disasters on the Koffee sofa. As presenter Karan Johar noted, he’s been a mascot for the celebrity talk show, but his appearances on shows with other actors have been considerably more entertaining than having him there for an entire episode. Not because he isn’t entertaining (he is smart and insightful), but because he becomes defensive about his inconsistent box office trend.
Why are you being so serious?
All of Arjun Kapoor’s appearances on Koffee with Karan seem to blend together. In practically all of them, he’s talking about how he deals with box office failure. He’s also been discussing his relationship with Malaika Arora on the Koffee sofa for the previous two seasons, though he kept his cool this time. You can’t blame Karan for asking Arjun the same old questions because his work and personal life have stayed rather stagnant.
It’s a stretch to see him justify his box office lows by comparing his career to that of Akshay Kumar and Saif Ali Khan. He may keep to that story in order to reinforce his own trust in himself, but the truth is that both Akshay and Saif did not take themselves seriously and flipped significantly in order to reclaim their significance. Arjun is nowhere near the inflexion points of other performers he uses as examples, given the type of movies he’s been doing recently and then justifying their failures.
Nobody can ever take away his credit for taking chances and coming out on top. But the manner he repeats things years later is likewise pretty improbable. With Abhishek Varman’s 2014 romantic comedy 2 States, Arjun claimed to be the first actor of his generation to achieve a 100 crore smash. Contemporaries Ranveer Singh and Ranbir Kapoor both had 100 crore successes with Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s 2013 love drama Goliyon Ki Rasleela: Ram-Leela and Anurag Basu’s 2012 rom-com Barfi!.
If Arjun does not consider them contemporaries (despite co-starring with Ranveer in Ali Abbas Zafar’s 2014 buddy action flick Gunday), and is referring to Varun Dhawan and Sidharth Malhotra, consider his leading woman in 2 States, Alia Bhatt, who debuted the same year as them in 2012. In less than a decade, she has delivered eight 100 crore hits. However, Arjun would not compare his trajectory to that of a female actor since it is more comfortable for him to feel superior to male performers of his ‘age.’
Maybe you could be a sport?
Arjun Kapoor has a flair for gab and can describe his approach to failure rather effectively. But the mask comes off as soon as he enters a competitive environment. During the pop culture quiz on Koffee with Karan 8, the questions were clearly biased in favor of Aditya Roy Kapur. Karan also tried to make things interesting by randomly giving greater weightage to questions Aditya had a better possibility of answering correctly.
Those would have been noble wars to fight, if they had been fought at all. But Arjun kept complaining, “But I said it first,” “Your buzzer is louder than mine,” “I need a replay of that,” and nearly walking away from the couch until he was handed the point. The only time he got the memo for the quiz – to have fun rather than go all front-bencher on it – was when he quipped that Karan prefers Aditya since Arjun isn’t a DCA (Dharma Cornerstone Agency, Karan’s talent management agency).
Arjun might have used his intelligence to win the Rapid Fire round. Instead of having fun with it, he went for the bait and grew more obscure in his replies towards the conclusion. After losing the Koffee hamper for the first time in years, he said that he should’ve ‘been massy, instead of being multiplex’ about it. When Aditya was chosen as the winner, Arjun remarked that it was all about his ‘excellent looks.’
, when we saw Arjun Kapoor try to make sense of his box office disasters on the Koffee){kind=link}