He can shoot bullets with his finger, kill with a handbag, make mosquitoes apologise, clone himself a hundred times, even seduce the gorgeous Aishwarya Rai Bachchan with the cheesy line, ‘come on, baby, give a beautiful kiss to the king’. So is it surprising that Rajinikanth, 61, has just starred in India’s most expensive film which is also set to become India’s most successful movie?
Three years after his last big hit, the Rs 60-crore, 1,000-print Sivaji: The Boss made Rs 128 crore; two years after the Rs 64-crore Kuselan tanked at the box office making just Rs 8 crore; and a year after his daughter’s ambitious animated film Sultan ran into production and legal troubles, Shankar’s Endhiran: The Robot has created a buzz that will translate into a Rs 300- crore box office gross on Sun Pictures’ publicly listed balance sheet and act as a neat little pre-Diwali gift to Tamil Nadu’s ruling family.
With the opening weekend gross alone being Rs 90 crore, he has also proved himself worthy of the tag of being Asia’s second highest paid actor at Rs 45 crore. Whether it is shooting down policemen as the evil robot with the memorable Terminator-like line, 'Happy Diwali, folks,’ or wooing Aishwarya with copies of A Briefer History of Time and Freakonomics, the hero-of-10-wigs has proved himself irresistible to all psychographics, young and old, MIT alumni and Mylapore maamis, urban sophisticates and rural fanatics.