akshay in chandini chowk to china

King
Khan can be back at the cricket crease — without any controversies —
this time round. Last year, the Bollywood badshah made headlines when
he hugged the Men in Blue under the full glare of TV cameras after
India had won the ICC Twenty20 World Cup.

There were murmurs
that he was doing it for some free publicity for his mega-budget movie
Om Shanti Om. The superstar had vowed then that he would no longer
watch a cricket match.

But Shah Rukh Khan need not be
apologetic any longer to go to a cricket match. For, he has, what some
say, paid an obscene sum to buy the Kolkata team franchisee rights of
the Indian Premier League (IPL) — promoted by the Board of Control for
Cricket in India (BCCI). His co-promoters in the $75.09-million deal
were his long-time friends — actor Juhi Chawla and filmmaker Jay Mehta.

The BCCI’s first shot with the Twenty20 format in India is an
uncharted territory for Shah Rukh, who has been dabbling with a few
roles in the Bollywood space — from being a theatre artist to TV actor,
filmstar to producer, TV host, and now the owner of an IPL cricket
team.

King Khan started his career with theatre and made his
first broadcast appearance through a television soap Fauji, and later
with Circus, both aired on Doordarshan.

While he is often rated
as the best actor in the Indian film industry, his stint as a producer
has been disappointing with just three hits of the seven films he has
produced.

In 2000, he produced his first Hindi movie Phir Bhi
Dil Hai Hindustani with Juhi Chawla under their production banner
Dreamz Unlimited.

The film bombed at the box office, followed
by another flop Asoka, a big-budget period film based on the emperor,
in 2001. The only hit Dreamz Unlimited delivered was in 2003, Chalte
Chalte, which featured Rani Mukherjee opposite Khan.

Shah Rukh
formed yet another film production house — Red Chillies Entertainment
—and the film company churned Main Hoon Na in 2004, which was an
instant hit. However, the two films that followed — Kaal and Paheli —
in 2005 weren’t crowd pullers.

Two years later, King Khan
struck gold by being the first Bollywood producer to have recovered and
made profit even before the release of his film Om Shanti Om.

The
film, with a budget of Rs 35 crore, starred Khan and newcomer Deepika
Padukone, and was sold to Eros International for a whopping Rs 74
crore, according to industry sources.

This apart, Shah Rukh
earned another Rs 10 crore approximately from the sale of music rights
to T-Series. If that wasn’t enough, Om Shanti Om was the first film to
have released its entire music album digitally across platforms for
full song downloads (mobile, online and digital media including
i-Tunes) across 23 countries.