Cinema is like a religion in India, observed Wim Wenders during his recent visit to the country. In fact, in this religiously diverse country, Bollywood might even have a greater impact. No matter which god one worships, we all kneel before Shah Rukh Khan, drool over our homegrown Greek God Hrithik Roshan, and when it is Eid, we celebrate it with a Salman Khan movie.

So, it is Eid and here I am sitting in a movie theatre waiting for Bhaijaan’s grand entry—this time as Sikandar. But before that comes the teasers of upcoming movies—Emraan Hashmi’s Ground Zero, Sanjay Dutt’s Bhootni, and Sunny Deol’s Jaat. It seems as if I have time travelled to the ’90s when cinema was made for and viewed at single-screen theatres packed with audience cheering and whistling for their favourite stars. Even as the movie starts, Salman Khan’s initial over-the-top action shots seamlessly fit into that world. But I am quickly brought back to reality—and the reason is not just that the rockstar hero of the ’90s, whose bare-chested shots made legions of youngster hit the gym, is now an ageing star struggling to move his body and had disinterest oozing out from every pore, but also the general tackiness of it all. While a similar aesthetic might have not looked out of place in the ’90s, in 2025, it looks dated. Added to this, the logic-defying and mind-numbingly dumb storyline built around organ donations reminded me of his 1999 movie Hello Brother—the latter, although a flop, was at least fun!

When in the post credit scene of Pathaan, Sharukh Khan as the eponymous hero tells Salman Khan's character, Tiger, "Hume hi karna padega bhai, desh ka sawaal hai, baccho pe nahi chod sakte", it was not lost on the audience what the two veteran actors—the last of the Bollywood superstars—were referring to. A sly dig at the younger generation of actors, in a rather tongue-in-cheek manner it floated, endorsed, and established the idea that the dismal state of the box office of Hindi cinema was partly due to the lack of ‘star power’ among the new breed of actors. Shah Rukh Khan who was making a comeback after the 2018 disaster, Zero, got the audiences flocking to the theatres for Pathaan, and to prove that it was no fluke, he repeated the same feat with his next release Jawan. This, coupled with the fact that the over-the-top cinema of South led by larger-than-life heroes was having a moment at the box office, ensured that Bollywood planned a slate of movies resurrecting the stars of the ’90s. And hence now we have a gamut of star-led big budget movies like Kesari Chapter 2, Bhootni, Ground Zero, Welcome to the Jungle, Raid 2, Jolly LLB3, War 2, and Lahore 1947, all up for release.

The big-screen, big-budget, mass cinema is often aspirational, and the need of larger-than-life characters can’t be denied. A star’s aura and swag often add in creating the desired impact. But just a star presence can’t ensure a hit. Case in point—Salman Khan’s Sikandar. Its dismal box office collection is a proof that star power alone can’t bring people to the theatres especially beyond the first weekend.

The producers, while roping in the stars to draw fans to the theatres, are increasingly losing the plot, quite literally. For Salman, his recent choice in movies has got his fans fondly claiming that Bhaijaan dil mein aate hain dimaag mein nahi. This is especially sad for an actor whose father, Salim Khan, is one half of the OG writers who scripted the rise of the Hindi mass cinema, which today is providing the blue-print for pan-Indian cinema whose leading men are mostly derivatives of Salim-Javed's ‘Angry Young Man’. But gone are the days when the audience bought movie tickets just to get a glimpse of their stars—they can now do so sitting at their home, scrolling through social media, without spending a single extra penny (apart from the Internet bill of course). And it doesn’t help that the ticket prices at the multiplexes have skyrocketed, and OTT platforms are bringing movies home at a fraction of the cost. Today, what makes the middle-class shell out a fortune to watch a movie on the big screen is the big experience—the paisa-vasool entertainment.

With the Pan-Indian movies getting box office success, Bollywood producers seem to have derived another fresh formula for success. Why not bring the best of both worlds—Bollywood heroes and the Pan-Indian aesthetics? But one needs to realise that Hindi mass cinema and Pan-Indian mass cinema are viewed through very different lenses. For the mainstream Bollywood audience ‘Pan-Indian’ cinema is more of a genre, and its aesthetics are often viewed as characteristics of the ‘genre’. This is obvious while processing the misogyny and problematic portrayal of women. How else do you explain why there was no backlash when in Pushpa, our eponymous hero, the messiah of the masses, played by Allu Arjun, pays the heroine for a kiss and is offended when she denies. But people were mighty offended when in a movie titled Animal, Ranbir Kapoor, behaves like an animal and describes the alpha males in the animal kingdom? Or why Kabir Singh, which indeed was problematic, faced so much criticism but not Arjun Reddy—the movie it was the Hindi adaptation of?

But it is not limited to that. Sunny Deol’s Jaat (I am not getting into the problematic religious politics of the movie or the lack of basic logic and plot), which has Sunny Deol doing quintessential Sunny Deol and a formidable villain played by Randeep Hooda, is a prime example of this. The movie has some rather cool, over-the-top massy, gravity-defying action scenes fit for the dhai kilo ka haath-flaunting Deol, which to my surprise got even the dainty multiplex audience to whistle and cheer. But the ’90s dubbed South-movie aesthetics of the movie, which became more pronounced post the interval, snapped that connect. Apart from the tacky wigs and makeup and the overly dramatic acting of the extras, in 2025, it is especially painful to see the Srilankan Tamil villain and his clan talking in fluent Hindi without an ounce of accent while the other characters played by South actors’ have their dialogues dubbed in Hindi and their lip-sync is totally off.

If the audience wants to watch massy South cinema, there is no dearth of options for that on the OTT platforms. Why would one want to watch a Bollywood movie to get a flavour of the South? Bollywood can’t look at a revival emulating or piggybacking on the commercial cinema of the South. Also, while claiming that South cinema has cracked the formula for success with their massy entertainers, we seem to conveniently forget that while this year we had a Pushpa 2, we also had a Game Changer—the Ram Charan and Kiara Advani starrer, mounted on a massive budget, became one of the biggest flops of recent times. In fact, out of the 241 Tamil films released in 2024, only about 18 films were successful at the box office.

Hindi cinema is today made as a commodity keeping in mind what has worked previously. It is not made by filmmakers who want to tell a story but by producers who want box office numbers. But box office success can’t be reverse engineered. Yes, you can buy a ‘houseful’ board by block booking, but it is still a lose-lose situation. A movie needs to be made well for it to sell the tickets. Cinema is an amalgamation of arts and commerce—it is where art is created with its commercial prospects in mind. But today, with cinema becoming ‘content’—something to be devoured, binge-watched, and not cherished—it is made on excel sheets. Instead of making a good movie that the audience will love, the focus is on creating the ‘right strategy’ for a movie to work. Producers, who often pride themselves as astute businessmen, instead of investing in a good script, spend massive amounts on scripting a fake ‘success’ story. Money can buy you media reviews; but it can’t buy you the love and whistles of the fans. Even the ‘filmmakers’ today seldom talk about how good or bad a movie is as a piece of cinema, the question that is always: kitna paisa kamayegi? The ones who were once the fresh breed of young filmmakers bursting with new ideas and stories in the early 2000s, closely on the heels of RGV, and promised a better future for massy commercial Hindi cinema driven by strong, rooted characters and solid writing, instead of banking solely on the stars, are today either disillusioned or fallen prey to the echo chambers.

Bollywood today is full of ‘smart’ people; but what it needs is people who are intelligent—to sell a 300-ruppee ticket in Rs 800, you need to be street smart; but to create a movie for which the audience will shell out that 800 bucks, you need to be intelligent. Not only a movie like Sikandar, where the second half revolves around the villain trying to destroy the lives of recipients of the hero’s dead wife’s organs instead of going after the hero who is the real enemy, fails to even make it to the IQ bell curve, by assuming that the audience is dumb and anything can be served in the name of ‘mass entertainer’ the filmmakers exposed their own lack of intelligence.

Cinema is like a religion in India, but unlike religion it doesn’t command blind faith. With ‘small-town’ Hindi-belt movies helmed by actors like Rajkummar Rao and Ayushmann Khurrana that had come up as ‘content-driven cinema’, becoming cookie-cutter versions of the same and hence losing their charm (and the ‘horror comedies’ staring at a similar future), and given the influx of PR-powered ‘nepo kids’, whose acting talent is best suited as background foliage at school plays, on screen, especially this year, the audience is also looking at their beloved stars. And with the likes of Akshay Kumar, Ajay Devgn, Sanjay Dutt, Sunny Deol, all having their movies lined up, it is almost an Avengers lineup—but is it enough to save Bollywood from its resident villains?