WHY INDIA'S BOLLYWOOD NEEDS A CREATIVE RESET

As big-budget films tank and audiences shift tastes, India's biggest movie industry faces reckoning

- BY NIDHI RAZDAN | Special to Gulf News

If there was one sure shot in Bollywood, it was that a film starring one of the Khans would be a blockbuster hit, especially over Eid.

But this year, Salman Khan's latest film, Sikandar has struggled at the box office. It only crossed the one-billion-rupee mark more than eight days after its release, symbolising the current crisis facing the Hindi film industry. Over the last couple of years, big-budget films, once a guaranteed draw for Indian audiences, are now routinely falling flat. Lavish productions with A-list stars, expansive sets, and aggressive marketing campaigns are delivering dismal returns.

And it is the Hindi film industry that has been hit the hardest. Take a huge star like Akshay Kumar. His last big hit film was back in 2021. Since then, at least eight of his films have flopped, in a row. 2025 has been pretty dismal on the whole for Bollywood so far. Apart from Sikandar, films like Sky Force, The Diplomat, and Kesari Chapter 2 have all fallen short.

According to Ormax media, there was a 13 per cent decline in the box office revenue of Hindi films from 2023 to 2024. Significantly, more than 30 per cent of this revenue came from South Indian films dubbed in Hindi. So what's going wrong?

From pandemic recovery to deep slump