Cinema is like a religion in India, said Wim Wenders during his recent visit. In fact, it will not be inapt to say that in this religiously diverse county, to a large degree, cinema holds the masses together. No matter which god one worships, we all kneel before our homegrown Greek God aka Hrithik Roshan. And when it is Eid, it is celebrated with a Salman Khan movie—it is an annual ritual especially for the 90-born Bollywood fans.

So, there I was, sitting in a movie theatre, for the Sikandar to arrive and bless us all. But before the grand arrival came the teasers. First it was Emraan Hashmi who seemed to be making a comeback as the leading man in Ground Zero. Then it was Sanjay Dutt turning a ghostbuster and unleashing his comic timing once again in Bhootni. And last but not the least, was Sunny Deol, the OG action star of the ’90s and his dhai kilo ka haath making an appearance in Jaat holding what looks like a rocket launcher. It seemed as if I have time travelled into the ’90s when cinema was made for and viewed on the single-screen theatres packed with audience cheering and whistling at their favourite stars. Even as the movie started, Salman Khan’s initial over-the-top action shots seamlessly fitted into that world.  

But I was quickly brought back to reality—and the reason was not just that the rockstar hero of the ’90s, whose bare-chested shots made legions of youngster hit the gym, was now an ageing star who seemed to be struggling to move any part of his body and had disinterest oozing 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 comes across as dated. Added to this, the logic-defying and mind-numbingly dumb storyline built around organ donations reminded me of his 1999 movie Hello Brother, which 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 chood 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. 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.  

But what came bundled with the stars was also the trashy aesthetics and formulaic and outdated storylines of the ’90s— things the current audience, fed on international cinema on the OTT platforms, doesn’t have the stomach for. While they might laud similar stuff in South cinema, for the mainstream Indian audience ‘Pan-Indian’ cinema is more of a genre and such aesthetics, along with its problematic portrayal of women, are often viewed as characteristics of the genre. There is no denying the fact that Hindi mass cinema and Pan-Indian mass cinema are viewed through very different lenses. 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?

Also, while claiming that South cinema has cracked the formula for success with their 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.  

But most importantly, while incorporating the aesthetic of the ’90s, which the current audience rightly finds dated or even tacky, the Bollywood producers and directors seem to be forgetting that the basic element that makes a middle-class family shell out a fortune to watch a movie on the big screen—the big experience, the value-for-money entertainment.  

For Salman, his fans fondly claim that Bhaijaan dil mein aate hain dimaag mein nehi. This is especially sad and ironical when you think that a story like this was accepted and endorsed by Salman Khan in the name of mass cinema, an actor whose father Salim Khan is one half of the OG writers who scripted the rise and rise of Hindi mass cinema, which today is providing the blue-print for pan-Indian cinema, with its heroes clearly being derivatives of the ‘Angry Young Man’. But gone are the days when the audience will flock to the theatres 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 sky-rocketed rendering such indulgences almost unaffordable for the mass audience, a major chunk of which hail from the lower or the middle-class.

The dismal box office collection of Sikandar is a proof that losing the plot and roping in a star might not be a very bright idea. Although mass cinema might sometimes need the larger-than-life heroes who benefit from the aura of the stars, only star power can’t bring people to the theatres especially beyond the first weekend. 

The basic problem today is that 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 they forget that 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. 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?. 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, 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 are exposing their own lack of intelligence.  

Cinema is like a religion in India, but unlike religion it doesn’t command blind faith. Given the influx of PR-powered nepo kids, whose acting talent as best suited as background foliage on school plays, on screen, especially this year, the audience is also looking at their beloved stars to save the day. With movies like Jaat, Bhootni, Ground Zero, Welcome to the Jungle, Rad 2, Jolly LLB3 all up for release this year and with Salman Khan and Sanjay Dutt reportedly coming together in a ‘rustic’ action movie, one hopes that they bring back the good old days of big-screen masala entertainers instead of unleashing another batch of drab excel-sheet projects. Money can buy you media reviews; but it can’t buy you the love and whistles of the fans.