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The game of flops and hits in Hindi cinema is getting piquant by the hour! No one can predict which movie will work, and which not, in the current scenario. After Dhurandhar released on December 5, Mardaani 3 has done decent business and Border 2 has seen a tepid reception, but that’s about all. 2026 has been as dry as the desert.
But there is one very transparent point that has been seen over the last 10 years: six of the biggest hits of each of these 10 years were real stories—either biopics (Dangal / 2016, Sanju / 2018 and Tanhaji: The Unsung Warrior / 2020) or descriptions of real events (URI—The Surgical Strike / 2019, The Kashmir Files / 2022 and Dhurandhar / 2025).
Dangal was the saga of the Phogats, the wrestler family from Haryana. Sanju was the life-story of Sanjay Dutt and Tanhaji… about Emperor Shivaji’s trusted military commander of that name. URI… was the narration of how Indian retaliated to Pakistan’s treacherous attack on our army. The Kashmir Files was a dramatized account of the sordid and brutal displacement of Kashmiri Pandits, while Dhurandhar looked again at the many Pakistani conspiracies against India.
And thus, we additionally note: four of these six movies concerned the nation: the 17th century Tanhaji… included. So, does this in any way indicate that our audience is now veering towards a more realistic content and also getting more ‘nationalistic’, to coin a term?
Veteran distributor and exhibitor Raj Bansal does not think so. “Ultimately, every genre of movie has to connect with the audience. Which means that it should entertain and have elements that serve the purpose!” he says. “Otherwise, I can mention a surfeit of biopics or patriotic films released in this period that did not go anywhere!” Bansal admits that it is a great skill to bring in a perfect element of entertainment within real-life cinema.
Veteran trade analyst, Taran Adarsh, specifies, “I would say audience is definitely endorsing a blend of realism and entertainment. But a dry, real film will not work. But I would not call Tanhaji… a biopic. It is a chapter from Maratha history.”
At this point, I would like to offer the rationale for terming URI—The Surgical Strike the biggest hit of 2019 over the highest grosser, another patriotic film, War.
Yes, it was about Return on Investment that decides the quantum of success as should be the case!
And which were the other four purely fictional films? Tiger Zinda Hai in 2017, Sooryavanshi in 2021, Jawan in 2023 and Stree 2 in 2024. Let us note here that the first three films were again patriotic in tenor! And each was supremelyentertaining.
And the final quirk here: In 2017, the actual highest grosser in Hindi was the originally Telugu Bahubali2—The Conclusion, the first film in Hindi to cross Rs. 50 billion net business in India, and in 2024, it was another Telugu drama, Pushpa 2: The Rise, which earned much more than Stree 2 did in its Hindi version alone!
