In today’s times, a director being sensitive is not as important as his having a graph showing hit movies. Thus it is back to tried and tested directors and who will understand this better than Anees Bazmi who has five mega films for this year and his hit formula remains the same. But who really cares as long as big stars and producers are ready to put their money on him.

Almost all big-budget movies of Bollywood this year are being directed by well-known directors. Producers feel that such big budget movies can only be looked after by directors such as Anees Bazmi and his formula of hit movies. Even big superstars are more comfortable with such directors. Of the movies to be released in 2011, five are being directed by Bazmi – “Thank you”, “Ready”, Hera pheri 4”, “It’s my life” and “No entry”. For him, it’s the same formula again and again – Punjabi Sikh, foreign locales and comedy. These are mantras that have helped other producers, too. “Welcome”, “No entry”, “Singh is king”, “No problem” are examples of the same. The other big-budget movies is “Ra.One”, which is being directed by Anubhav Sinha, who doesn’t have a very great graph where hits are concerned but the main reasons Shah Rukh signed him was because he is comfortable with him. Talking about the comfort levels between the director and the actor, we need to mention Akshay Kumar’s “Patiala House”. It is directed by Nikhil Advani, who had also done “Chandni Chowk to China” with Akshay Kumar. The audience knows how the movie fared at the box office and Advani has no great record but because he gets along with Akshay, the actor is willing to risk it with him and the movie’s producer. Farhan Akhtar, Shriram Raghavan, Rohan Sippy and Imtiaz Ali are trying their old formulas this year again. But we’ll have to see what the box office has to say about them.