Is Shah Rukh Khan’s Fan 'inspired' by this bad Robert De Niro movie?

For a while, Fan has been touted as the movie that will lift SRK from the mediocrity hell that he seems to be stuck in for a while. It’s been a long time since any of us have seen Shah Rukh Khan in a role that’s not a sad caricature of himself (Fan is still a caricature, just not sad). In fact, we've been waiting for some time for Raees and Fan to see SRK get out of run that started with Ra One and continued happily till Dilwale, making us wonder why one of the greatest actor of his generation must fall for the ‘Bhaiploitation’ trap that has plagued Bollywood since the success of Salman Khan’s Dabbang.

Dilwale in particular was a godawful travesty, and the biggest lesson we learned was that the right to direct Bollywood’s most romantic couple shouldn’t be given to a guy who judges his film’s success on the number of SUVs that are blown up. Despite, the crazy marketing campaign, the movie fared poorly at the box office (by SRK standards), which makes the arrival of Fan even more intriguing.  

Here was finally a movie where we’d get to see Shah Rukh Khan be himself, and also play his younger version.

The new trailer was also promising which shows us how the tables turn when a superstar rejects his fan. In many ways, even the launch of the trailer was a hat-tip to SRK’s immense popularity as 5000 of his craziest fans, along with journalists (many of whom are crazy fanboys themselves), turned up to watch the launch. 

But when I saw the trailer, it actually reminded me of an old Robert De Niro flick, and one that was far from his masterful performances in movies like Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas and Cape Fear. The movie was quite bad, and holds a 38% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and based on the trailer, SRK’s Fan seems to have a lot of plot similarities. 

Based on a novel by Peter Abrahams, the movie starred De Niro as a mentally unstable baseball fan and Wesley Snipes as a superstar ball player for the San Francisco Giants. In the movie, De Niro’s entire existence is based on his support for Snipes and his team and he loses his son and job to his obsession. De Niro goes as far as to kill off Snipes’ rival, and acts like a spurned lover when his affection isn’t returned by his hero.

From what we’ve seen in the trailer, while one SRK role (the superstar’s) seems to be based on Wesley Snipe’s character the other one of the crazy fan seems based on Robert De Niro’s character.  That being said, the ages of the characters seem to have been reversed, and it’d be pretty stupid to base a movie on something that every Tom, Dick and Harry can find on Google or IMDB. And which was also called The Fan. 

But then this is an industry where they think a good marketing campaign can replace a good story,  but we will have to wait and watch to see how much similarity there exists between the two movies. Surely, after eschewing plots for so long, the good denizens of Bollywood wouldn't suddenly lift one from a movie that has the same name?  Watch the trailer again and tell us whether you think the two movies are similar: