The night outside Mannat felt like a familiar film close: a patchwork of phone lights bobbing in the dark, hand-painted placards trembling with slogans, “King Khan,” the popular birthday song “Bar Bar Din Ye Aaye,” and the ritual chant of a fandom that has, for decades, treated birthdays like holy days. Mannat is the name of Shah Rukh Khan’s bungalow and a pilgrimage site of sorts for fans from Mumbai and around the world.
On the morning Shah Rukh Khan turned 60, the internet too lit up: celebrities, politicians, and millions of ordinary accounts posted messages, photographs, and reels. The outpouring felt vast, immediate—and oddly, bittersweet. For every “Long live the King,” there was a quieter question: Is the age of the singular, cinema-spanning superstar ending with him? Is Shah Rukh Khan, as his long-time friend and comrade Karan Johar, the last superstar?
But then came a surprise that suggested the opposite. On his birthday, Khan’s wife and film producer Gauri Khan released the first look of his upcoming action thriller King, directed by Siddharth Anand and co-produced by Khan’s production house Red Chillies Entertainment. The teaser revealed a silver-haired SRK in a violent, brooding avatar—blood-spattered, gripping a King-of-Hearts card. It was both a shock and a statement: the romantic hero who once personified tenderness is now remaking himself as a global action star.
The Affective Empire of SRK
To understand why this transformation matters, you have to return to how the feeling began. Shah Rukh Khan’s rise in the 1990s — from television actor to romantic lead to an emblem of aspirational modern India — coincided with an audiovisual and sociocultural moment that made stars into emotional shorthand. He wasn’t merely a box-office draw; he became a repository for personal stories: the young lover who found solace in his dialogue, the migrant worker who saw himself in a rags-to-riches arc, the diasporic family who heard home in his songs, the lonely housewife who sees a loving and attentive husband in his expressions. These are not trivial attachments. They are a kind of social memory, distributed across millions of small, private acts of fandom.
But that infrastructure of feeling—screenings, fan clubs, annual pilgrimages to actors’ homes—was always fragile because it rested on an industrial ecosystem that is changing fast. The film-star system relied on a concentrated economy of attention. In the 1990s and early 2000s, a handful of films and television channels united audiences in a single shared gaze in which audiences encountered the star again and again. That model created celebrities who seemed to occupy public life in the way a stadium does: everyone gathered in one place at once.
Very little of that exists now. Scholars and industry analysts point to the rising power of streaming platforms, shorter attention spans, and an explosion of content niches as factors that erode that shared space. In short, the crowd is fragmenting.
Digital Devotion and the New Action King
Digital fandom helped sustain and then transform SRK’s aura. Early online fan clubs organized coordinated campaigns, subtitled clips for foreign viewers, and turned private admiration into public events. More recently, platform moments—his Met Gala 2025 debut in black Sabyasachi, an IIFA performance, the global rollout of Jawan, and now King—do the work that a daily star presence once did. Still, they also change the terms of devotion. A global red-carpet image can translate into international prestige and luxury branding, but it is not the same as the intimate, repetitive co-presence that comes from weekly cinema-going or steady TV reruns. The stardom remains dazzling, but its light now flickers through algorithms.
With King, the transformation feels strategic. It follows the success of Pathaan and Jawan, both of which re-established Khan as an action figure rather than the archetypal lover. Gauri Khan’s role as producer underscores that this reinvention is deliberate and family-driven—the same production house that once gave India its softest romances now architects its slickest spectacles. The birthday teaser, released by his wife rather than a studio press desk, fuses the personal and the professional: the domestic gesture becomes a marketing event, the marriage becomes mythology.
What’s Actually Fading?
If stardom isn’t “fading,” what precisely is fading? Not adoration, nor the ability to move crowds—fans still travel across cities, countries, and continents to mark SRK’s birthday, and social feeds still overflow with tributes. What feels different is the quality of attachment. The star remains, but the public’s sustained attention does not.
First, the industry shift. The era of tent-pole releases and long theatrical runs has been punctured by platform economics. Streaming has multiplied outlets, shortened promotional cycles, and shifted power toward content creators and algorithms rather than singular marquee names. The result is less shared appointment viewing and more fragmented, individualized consumption.
Younger audiences, raised on memes, influencers, and serialized global TV, form attachments differently. Virality and relatability often trump long-term hero worship. New faces, genres, and storytelling formats attract attention that used to flow to the film lot. Actors still inspire fervor, but the rituals—the long queue outside a theatre or the seasonal birthday vigil—are less ubiquitous. Even when fandoms organize mass events, like the ones for South Indian stars, it all begins on social media. But even this reinvention reveals the tension of modern stardom: to remain relevant, stars must constantly rewrite the story of who they are.
And let’s not forget—SRK’s career lifecycle and strategy underwent a massive overhaul. Of late, his personal branding has shifted towards promoting women’s emancipation (in a tea brand advertisement, he announced that his movies will feature the actress’s name before his own). His persona as a romantic hero was, anyway, everything women wanted in men but never received—soft, sensitive, patient, and empathetic. However, he is also the actor who normalized older male actors romancing much younger actresses on screen—a trend that continues. However, this trend, once dismissed as formulaic, now feels emblematic of an older stardom model struggling to adapt. What once signified power and desirability may, to younger audiences, feel outdated or even tone-deaf.
Continuity and Metamorphosis
Remember how back in 2009, Twitter crashed when news of Michael Jackson’s demise first broke? Remember the frenzy behind Elvis Presley’s death and the massive outpour of fans at his funeral? This year, musician and filmmaker Zubeen Garg passed away, and his home state, Assam, set a Limca Record for the 4th largest funeral gathering in the world. So, the story is not all decline. Fandom has globalized and platformized: there are fan-run charity drives, watch parties across time zones, and meme cultures that keep a star’s image alive in distributed ways. Shah Rukh’s 60th birthday was a case in point—thousands still gathered, and millions more celebrated worldwide, but a lot of it happened digitally. The rituals changed shape, but they did not vanish.
The King teaser itself became a ritual, a digital pilgrimage of sorts: within hours, fan clubs translated, subtitled, and recut the footage into multiple formats, flooding timelines across languages. In this way, SRK remains the rare figure capable of commanding collective digital attention—the difference is that his congregation now assembles in pixels rather than plazas.
Stardom is Reinvention
So when we speak of fading stardom, we’re really describing a change in the technology of attention. Stars no longer monopolize the public imagination because publicness itself has atomized. The superstar, once a symbol of shared national emotion, now competes with countless micro-celebrities, viral influencers, and streaming icons.
And yet, Shah Rukh Khan at 60 is an archive of feeling. He is the man whose lines read like family lore in many households; the celebrity who can still stop a city when he appears on a balcony; the global ambassador who took a Bollywood swagger to the Met Gala; and now, the action anti-hero of King, redefining what maturity can look like on screen.
Perhaps that’s what it means to be the last superstar: to understand that survival isn’t about resisting change but mastering it. The crowd may have moved on, but the King knows how to follow—sometimes with open arms, sometimes with a clenched fist, and always, somehow, in step with the times.
Article Courtesy of Neha Jha