For a long time now, Bollywood has been doing something clever, convenient and deeply dishonest: it has been shrinking its ambition and then marketing that shrinkage as victory. That is why the stunning run of Dhurandhar The Revenge feels bigger than a blockbuster. It feels like a public unmasking.
Because when a film comes along and starts operating at this level, it does not just break records. It exposes the inflation in the language, the inflation in the self-congratulation, and the inflation in the way Bollywood has been defining “success” for itself in recent years.
Let’s be honest. Hindi cinema had started becoming far too comfortable celebrating modest wins in blockbuster language.
A film does decent business? It is sold as a huge triumph.
A star vehicle avoids disaster? It is packaged as a roaring comeback.
A glossy urban entertainer performs respectably? It is projected as if the audience has fallen in love with Bollywood all over again.
But had it really?
Because when one now looks at the scale of Dhurandhar 2, a lot of recent chest-thumping starts looking wildly overdone. Suddenly, the victory laps around films that merely held their ground feel exaggerated. Suddenly, the industry’s habit of dressing up not bad as historic looks less like optimism and more like insecurity. That is the real sting of Dhurandhar 2. It has not merely succeeded. It has exposed how low the bar had quietly become.
Take the larger pattern. In the recent past, films like Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, Tu Jhoothi Main Makkaar, Satyaprem Ki Katha and several other better-than-expected performers were celebrated with such relief that one could almost sense an industry desperate to declare victory wherever it could find one. There is nothing wrong with those films working within their zone. But the way many such performances were elevated in discourse made it seem as if Bollywood was still routinely producing theatrical juggernauts. It wasn’t.
Then there were the big-star spectacles that did put up numbers, but also created a dangerous side effect: they gave the industry just enough cover to avoid asking harder questions. Pathaan and Jawan were genuine event films, no doubt. They proved that Hindi cinema could still trigger hysteria when the scale, star power and urgency aligned. But instead of learning the right lesson from those films that audiences reward conviction and magnitude, Bollywood often learnt the lazier one: that hype can compensate for shrinking imagination.
It couldn’t. And that is why Dhurandhar 2 lands like a slap.
Because now the difference is too visible to hide. One can no longer casually put every respectable grosser and every genuinely monstrous theatrical event in the same emotional basket. One can no longer pretend that a decently performing urban romance, a PR-armoured star launch, and a genuine market rattling blockbuster belong in the same conversation. Dhurandhar 2 has restored hierarchy brutally.
Because once a film reaches this kind of scale, it inevitably humiliates the comfort zones around other stars. The carefully maintained illusion that every major actor is still operating in the same league starts collapsing. It raises nasty questions. Which stars are truly capable of causing a market tremor? Which ones are surviving on branding? Which openings were real public hunger, and which were just fan-club noise amplified by social media? Which successes came from genuine box office muscle, and which came from the industry’s reduced expectations?
That is not a pleasant conversation for many camps.
Especially because Bollywood, for some time now, has looked increasingly afraid of its own shadow. Release calendars are treated like minefields. Clashes are avoided like scandal. Budgets are spoken about with nervousness. Trade language has become strangely protective. Every film seems to arrive with built-in excuses, genre issue, date issue, market issue, urban issue, mass issue, post-pandemic issue, attention-span issue. Somewhere in all this, Hindi cinema stopped sounding like an industry trying to conquer and started sounding like one trying not to get embarrassed. That is why Dhurandhar 2 feels like such an indictment.
It suggests that Bollywood did not lose the audience’s appetite for giant cinema. It lost the courage to consistently make and market giant cinema with full-blooded conviction.
For years, Bollywood has been praising content as if the audience had permanently moved away from scale. But the repeated truth is harsher: audiences did not reject scale. They rejected half-hearted scale. They did not reject stars, they rejected lazy star vehicles. They did not reject theatres, they rejected films that wanted theatrical money without theatrical ambition.
That is why many so-called big films of recent times now look strangely small next to Dhurandhar 2. Not because they were all failures. Many weren’t. But because they were being discussed with a level of self-importance that the numbers, impact and cultural force did not always justify.
And that is exactly the sort of line that will hurt fandoms, because fandom thrives on flattening differences. Every star’s fan army wants its own film presented as epochal. Every decent box office result must become proof of supremacy. Every comeback must become history. Every respectable total must become monstrous. Dhurandhar 2 has arrived to destroy that comfort. It has brought back scale as a weapon of comparison.
Now comes the most uncomfortable part: this should worry Bollywood, not just excite it.
Because whenever one film wins this hard, an insecure industry learns the wrong lessons. Instead of understanding what made the film feel like an event, it often rushes to imitate the outer packaging. More noise, more rage, more scale, more franchise bait, more universe-building, more testosterone, more screaming posters. That is where the danger lies. Dhurandhar 2 should be a wake-up call about ambition, not an excuse for mindless copycat filmmaking.
But whether Bollywood learns the right lesson or not, one truth has already become impossible to ignore.
For too long, the industry had been throwing confetti on films that were really just respectable survivors. For too long, it had been treating recovery as domination and adequacy as greatness. For too long, it had become comfortable sounding bigger than it actually was. Dhurandhar 2 has punished that delusion. It has exposed how easily Bollywood had started congratulating itself for too little, how quickly it had started mistaking survival for supremacy, and how quietly its ambition had shrunk. The film did not just go big at the box office. It made the rest of Bollywood look like it had stopped thinking big enough.
Also Read: Ranveer Singh starrer Pralay is not an adaptation, reveals Hansal Mehta
The post Dhurandhar 2 has exposed an ugly truth – it exposed how Bollywood had started throwing confetti on mediocrity appeared first on Bollywood Hungama.
from Bollywood Hungama https://ift.tt/9ALvFiN
