There is a familiar cycle in Hindi cinema. A film works. Its box office numbers become the reference point. Soon, similar stories begin appearing in development, similar pitches start making the rounds and an individual film’s success quietly turns into an industry template. Kareena Kapoor Khan believes that is precisely the problem.
In a recent town hall conversation with Yuvaa, Kareena called out what she described as Bollywood’s “herd mentality”, questioning the belief that there must be a formula behind every successful film. Her example was deliberately blunt.
“I think all these things are very dated that there should be a formula to the film,” Kareena said during the conversation. She then referred to the success of Ranbir Kapoor’s Animal and the industry’s tendency to draw the wrong lesson from it. “Now Animal has worked, so now they are like: ‘chalo sab violence kar lete hai’,” she said.
The more important part of her argument, however, was not about violence or Animal. It was about the industry’s assumptions about the audience.
“Our audience is smarter than we think,” Kareena said. “They know exactly when it’s a good film and they want to watch.” She argued that viewers can no longer be expected to turn up simply because a film belongs to a currently popular genre or follows a recognisable commercial formula. “Today, it is not about this is a young love story and it should have a song,” she added.
That may sound like a fairly familiar argument until Prithviraj Sukumaran’s comments in the same larger discussion are brought into it. Because his point goes closer to the root of the problem.
“The whole thing of writers is very underrated. In Malayalam cinema, writers are pretty much the centre stage,” Prithviraj said. He explained that in Malayalam cinema, it is often the writer who takes the script to an actor or director in the first place. “Ultimately, films are written by writers. We need to understand and acknowledge the fact that writers are very important.”
He went one step further, pointing towards a structural difference between the two industries. “The incentive for a writer to come up with really inventive stuff is a lot more in Malayalam industry,” he said.
That is perhaps the more uncomfortable question for Bollywood. Is the industry really suffering from a shortage of ideas, or is it suffering from a system that becomes more comfortable backing an idea after somebody else has already proved that it works?
Meghna Gulzar, who was part of the same conversation, offered another piece of the puzzle. She argued that writers need the confidence that comes from knowing the actor, director and producer are willing to back them when they attempt something unconventional.
“It is not like writers don’t want to write or push the envelope or break the box and go out of it,” Meghna said. “It is about getting the wall behind you to be able to do that. Whether the producer, director, or actor is endorsing it.” She described that support as “a collective responsibility” of the people involved in a film.
Put the three arguments together and Kareena’s criticism begins to look less like an attack on one commercial trend and more like a diagnosis of the Hindi film business.
The writer comes up with something different. The producer asks whether something similar has already worked. The market provides a recent success as reassurance. The industry interprets that success as a formula. And by the time the next films reach the audience, the audience has already moved on.
Kareena’s other point is arguably even more relevant to that cycle. She does not believe audiences need to be told what they should watch. She believes they are becoming better at deciding for themselves.
“Now, I think things are changing. Thanks to people sitting at the back. Now they will sense and they will go by the trailer and they will say no we want to watch this film,” she said.
Prithviraj made the same argument in a different way. If Sanjay Leela Bhansali announced a film starring Amitabh Bachchan and Rekha, he said, “I will go watch first day first show.” The point was not that such a film exists. The point was that audiences can still be sold on an idea, irrespective of conventional calculations about age, image or the supposed commercial shelf life of a star, when the combination of talent and content creates genuine curiosity.
There is a certain irony in the fact that these remarks are surfacing just days before Kareena and Prithviraj arrive together in Daayra, Meghna Gulzar’s September 18 release. The film has been built around a crime story inspired by real events, with Meghna, Yash Keswani and Sima Agarwal credited as writers. Meghna has also spoken about the unusually long research and writing process behind the film, which took around two years.
In other words, the film attached to this conversation is itself an example of the argument being made.
No established franchise is doing the heavy lifting. No currently fashionable genre is being sold as a guarantee. And the starting point is not a box-office formula borrowed from the last hit. It is a script, developed over an extended period, backed by a filmmaker known for research-driven storytelling and fronted by actors from different film industries.
That does not mean a writer-led film automatically succeeds. Nor does it mean Malayalam cinema has some magic formula that Bollywood lacks. What it does suggest is that the industry’s obsession with decoding the previous hit may be distracting it from the more difficult task of creating the next one.
Kareena’s warning, therefore, is not really that Bollywood makes too many action films, romantic films or violent films. It is that the industry keeps trying to discover what audiences will like by looking backwards.
Prithviraj’s answer is to look at where the idea begins. With the writer. And that may be the real fault line in Bollywood’s current debate over what audiences want: perhaps the problem is not that the audience has become impossible to understand. Perhaps the industry has simply become too reluctant to surprise it.
