Dissecting the empty void that is Bollywood today
The last time I went to the theater to watch a Bollywood blockbuster was Shah Rukh Khan’s Jawan and no one in god’s good grace could have prepared me for the absolute slop that I was about to witness. My eyes could not believe what I was seeing, the action made Rajnikanth seem like an indie actor in a low-budget mumblecore film.
Calling it over-the-top would be an affront to all the over-the-top movies trying to retain a semblance of sense in their films. The entire film was a preachy Shah Rukh Khan vanity project with the vanilla morality of a 10-year-old. And with barely a moment to breathe, Jawan taught me that films today seem to be designed for kids who use the auto-scroll feature on Instagram to doomscroll.
Bollywood recently has seen the rise of a new breed of films: films that are either sequels, remakes, nationalist slop or machismo filled vanity projects for already established stars. There seems to be a total dearth of new, original or even entertaining films. The problem is not simply a lack of originality. There seems to be a certain staleness that has infected the whole industry, where even the mindless humour that used to entertain us as kids is gone.
The joyous silly humour of 2000s Bollywood comedies such as Bhagam Bhag, Welcome and the Golmaal have been replaced by a kind of artificial humour performed by uber privileged nepo babies who have no connection to real life. An appropriate example of this is the ludicrous Judwa 2 starring Varun Dhawan (did we really need a sequel to Judwa?) with director David Dhawan trying to mindlessly rehash the same kind of 90s formula best epitomised by Govinda’s jokes and brilliant comic timing.
The Endless Remakes and Sequels
Perhaps the best examples that represent the sorry state of affairs Bollywood is in right now are the Bhool Bhulaiya sequels starring Kartik Aryan. Which were nothing but shameless cash grabs, trying to piggy bank off of the success of a movie that was itself a remake of a Tamil movie (The 2005 Rajnikanth Starrer Chandramukhi). Even our sequels are sequels to movies that are not even original.
Sequels and Remakes have become the staple now. The data on this is stark: as of a few years ago, Bollywood was simultaneously remaking as many as 11 films that were originally South Indian hits, spanning family dramas, action films, and thrillers. This has not slowed. In 2024, an astoundingly high percentage of 31% of Hindi cinema’s total collections came not from original Hindi films at all, but from dubbed versions of South Indian films. The single highest-grossing “Hindi” film of 2024 wasn’t even a Hindi film – it was the dubbed version of the telugu film Pushpa 2. Bollywood is undoubtedly in a dire state, let us dissect why.
A Politically Charged Atmosphere
You then have a series of nationalist propaganda films that seem to roll out faster than the population of Sudan. From Dhurandhar to Emergency to Mission Majnu, there is a growing cultural trend of making films that are politically charged and hypernationalistic – while that in and of itself may not be a problem – the state backing and endorsements that these films get make producers think that these are the only kinds of films that should get made. As they prove to be safe and uncontroversial, and even if the film does not do well monetarily, they bask in the fact that at least there won’t be any kind of institutional or public backlash against such a film.
When the state incentivises films that promote a certain ideology; creativity, originality and boundary pushing courage take a back seat. Our obsession with making biopics in recent times, from MS Dhoni to Kesari to Chhaava, is a prime marker that we have become creatively bankrupt. A sign that political and cultural messaging have started to outweigh craftsmanship and creativity.
Again, while the making of these films might be beneficial or even necessary to instill a sense of pride and belonging, it becomes a problem when this breed of films take up all of the space. And it leads to the near impossibility of smaller, quirkier, weirder stories to even pitch themselves because they do not follow a recent cultural commandment.
Following The Money
A more structural problem behind this creative void is that studios are now too big to fail, and too big to gamble. When producers bet 250-300 crores on a movie, they better know whether the movie is going to make some money back. Films with that kind of corporate backing need to be universal hits just to break even. This kind of studio pressure forces every single decision towards the safest possible bet: a superstar, a well-known franchise, a known formula. Fighter, the 2024 Hrithik Roshan starrer had a reported budget of 250 crores. 2023’s Pathan had a budget of 225-250 crores. Even a decade ago this kind of money was unheard of, being the budget of only some outlier project involving international artists. Today it is the standard budget for a big star vehicle.
When the entire model depends on guaranteeing avoiding a box office loss rather than making a film that engages an audience, what you get is exactly that – a film that cowers to the lowest common denominator, becoming easily digestible slop that provides nothing to its audiences.
Absurd star fees compound the problem – Akshay Kumar, Shah Rukh Khan, and Aamir Khan and lots of others are known to demand hundreds of crores to act in a film. When a lead actor’s paycheck alone can eat a third of the budget, producers have less room to gamble on a story that has not been tested or a young up and coming director with fresh ideas. The film has to appeal to everyone at every stage, which usually means it has to offend no one and in equal measures surprise no one.
Writers are often at the bottom of the food chain.
It is a rather open secret that our writers are paid in pennies compared to the stars and the directors. Screenwriter Hussain Dalal – one of the more successful working writers, credited with lines from Yeh Jawani Hai Deewani – has described writers being at the bottom of the food chain, adding that production houses won’t even tag him on social media posts quoting his own dialogue because writers aren’t considered part of a film’s top-tier credits.
The payment structures are worse than the recognition problem. Writers commonly receive only 10% of their fee on signing, another 10-20% once a script is approved, with the bulk of payment contingent on whether an actor eventually signs onto the project, which means that a writer can do the entire creative work and still walk away with nothing if the project stalls, which in Bollywood, it very often does. One industry insider put it bluntly: “Payment tranches are the biggest tool of exploitation”
Contracts have also pushed writers to waive moral rights and royalty claims beyond their initial fee. In some cases, writers are asked to shoulder legal liability for a script that a producer has already approved. In an industry where your writers are treated like dirt, there is no incentive for them to produce scripts of quality or scripts that they pour their heart into. The result is out there for everyone to see – half hearted formulaic scripts that simply and desperately want to be picked up by some big shot.
Bombay’s Insularity
Bollywood is becoming an increasingly cut-off and insular industry, it has turned into a world where writers dream and write only about Bombay, constantly referencing other films in their own. Their entire worldview now rests on and derives from Bollywood itself. It is becoming a cannibalistic, self-referential entity that is gazing too deep into itself and finding out that there is nothing within.
In a 2019 interview with Art Deco Mumbai about Bombay Velvet, Anurag Kashyap said he began writing the film to capture the city’s lost ambition and corruption, not just its nostalgia. He remarked that “you find that world online but don’t see it in our old movies” pointing out how filmmakers keep recycling cinematic tropes instead of engaging with Bombay’s real history and social life. As Kashyap observes here, Bombay’s filmmakers and filmmakers in general, increasingly reference only other films, creating a closed circuit of imitation that ignores the city’s lived realities.
This is a problem because great films come from writers and directors channeling their authentic experiences and emotions, experiences that are grounded in reality. Look at films like Motwane’s Udaan and Imtiaz Ali’s Rockstar, despite not being strictly autobiographical they contain the traces of their director’s personalities in them. They were imbibed by a kind of personal emotional truth.
When your references are entirely other films, one can only make flimsy films, films that have no real substance to them, films that are only ornamental in purpose. For a film to have an identity of its own it needs to ground itself in someone’s truth. When that truth is filtered through several layers (of other people’s art, other people’s films) what you get is a lesser version of what you were copying in the first place.
Theatres Are Empty
The post-pandemic rise of OTT platforms has fundamentally altered audience behaviour, fragmenting viewership in ways Bollywood has struggled to keep up with. Before the pandemic, Bollywood could rely on theatrical exclusivity and limited competition for mainstream attention. Today however, audiences have instant access to high quality films from across India and around the world. Often available with subtitles or dubbing.
As a result, many stories that once justified a trip to the theater no longer do. The theatrical experience is now reserved for the truly rare event, a spectacle. This has left Bollywood in a rather sensitive position. Empty theaters translate into financial pressure and financial pressure transforms into risk aversion. This creates the need for studios to chase the broadest possible demographic, the worst example of which is the recently released Welcome To The Jungle, which has an ensemble cast of 30 plus stars, and which promises to be a mind numbingly braindead experience – judging by its seizure inducing trailer.
Whatever is created to appeal to everyone ends up appealing to the lowest possible demographic that will gobble up anything. What we ultimately end up receiving are nothing works of art, art that no one will remember, art that no one will stop for, art with no artistic merit whatsoever, creating no difference whatsoever, just strutting along being inoffensive and safe, keeping everyone mildly happy.
