For the Chinese, veteran actor Aamir Khan, "Uncle Khan," is the symbol of Indian films. (Photo : Getty Images)
Since Hollywood movies are the ones the rule the box office in China, Bollywood star Aamir Khan is the exception to the rule. In 2011, his movie “Three Idiots” was shown in China and it was ranked on Douban, a popular entertainment website in China, as the 12th most popular movie of all time in the Asian giant.
Chinese Millennials Identify with Past Movie of Khan
Chinese millennials could identify with how the excessive pressure students at the fictional Imperial College of Engineering faced. The college mimicked academic conditions at the Indian Institutes of Technology.
Quartz reported that in the film, two Indian men attempt to find their third engineering school friend, played by Aamir Khan, whom they have not seen in 10 years. The movie used the flashback technique to show their conflict with “Virus,” their nickname for a strict college principal. One of the three engineering students attempted suicide when he was not allowed to graduate from college.
On May 6, another movie of Aamir Khan would debut in China. Many Chinese males could identify with the theme of “Shuaijiao Baba” or “Let’s Wrestle, Father,” which is the gender imbalance in India as families prefer sons over daughters. The film is known as “Dangal” or “Wrestling Competition” in India which similarly has a headcount of more than 1 billion people.
4 Daughters
The movie is based on the life of an ex-Indian wrestling champion who trained two of his daughters to be world-class wrestlers because his wife gave birth to four daughters only. Haryana, an Indian state in the country’s north is the setting for the film, one of the four Indian films that China allows to be shown yearly out of the 42 foreign films allowed in China, 38 of which are Hollywood movies.
Meanwhile, Aamir Khan’s new movie in India, “Bahubali 2: The Conclusion” would open on April 28 with an assured audience of more than 1 million which is the number of movie tickets booked online in just 24 hours, Bollywood Life reported.
