Karan Johar slams ‘herd mentality’ as he talks about Pushpa, Chhaava, Stree 2 success; addresses spy universe craze and asks, “How will I stand out if I copy?” - EXCLUSIVE

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Karan Johar is known for his candour, and in a recent conversation with Bollywood Hungama, the filmmaker once again shared some hard-hitting insights - this time on the current state of storytelling in the Hindi film industry. From genre fatigue to the obsession with cinematic universes, Johar didn’t hold back in expressing his views on why originality should be celebrated, not sidelined. “I think it's everybody grappling to do what others are doing. I think herd mentality. So, we see Pushpa running and catering so strongly to the tier two and tier three audiences. Suddenly there'll be 20 others wanting to do the same. You see Chhaava working, and everybody will want to make historical dramas! After Stree, everybody wants to make horror comedies. Those worked because they were individually strong, and there was no other option in that genre. And it was a unique thought that made those films work. We all have individual thoughts that are unique to ourselves,” Karan told Bollywo...
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Zoey 102 review – Jamie Lynn Spears returns for unwanted nostalgia reboot

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The long-gestating movie follow-up to the mid-aughts Nickelodeon show gets mired in a familiar ongoing adolescence

If I were a television executive, particularly one at a large streaming platform that contains a teen network, I would certainly consider a reboot of Zoey 101. The tween series, which ran from 2005 to 2008 and starred Jamie Lynn Spears as a boarding school student in Malibu, is remembered fondly by a certain slice of Nickelodeon-raised late millennials. Its ending felt premature and tinged with sadness, as the series finale aired a few months after Spears, the younger sister of Britney, revealed that she was pregnant at 16. Though the show had already wrapped production before Jamie Lynn became a too-young tabloid fixture, the popular impression was that her off-screen shock pregnancy torpedoed the cutesy, very PG series. (As a 14-year-old at the time, this was a brain-searing event.)

In other words, there’s an on-paper case for Zoey 102, the new Paramount+ movie reboot of the series, in the sense that there was a lingering feeling of unfinished business to the show and that streaming service logic demands anything once popular be tried again. But it’s a fool’s errand. The revisionist happy ending for Zoey 101 feels at best strange and too overdue to work. (The logline bills the reboot as Zoey finding herself in her 20s, though the cast “graduated” high school 15 years ago and are almost entirely in their mid-30s; Spears herself is 32.) At worst, as often is the case with the finished product, it’s so focused on recapturing long past, hazily remembered magic as to be cringe-inducing.

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