Hype, gripe and tripe seamlessly blended in the first half of 2025 along with ‘Wipe’!
When I use this last word, I seriously mean that while a lot of the tripe was deservedly wiped out by the smart audience (Azaad, Deva, Mere Husband Ki Biwi and Kapkapii with Fateh, Sikandar and The Bhootnii topping the list!), there was something else that was wiped off too! And that was the credibility of the industry!
Hype and Wipe!
And the last was because the b-o figures were hyped beyond all limits. In a classic “Wolf! Wolf!” situation, there was skepticism even in the collection figures of films like Jatt, Kesari 2, Sky-Force, Raid 2, Housefull 5 and Sitaare Zameen Par, even though the first two films did not touch the still-considered-magical 100 crore mark in India. As for Chhaava, disbelief looms large over its spectacular lifetime collection dished out as Rs. 708.5 crore (net) domestically and Rs. 88.84 outside.
And so, the Hype generated the Wipe! Seasoned mediapersons have long accepted b-o. figures dished out by producers and PRs as exaggerated to the tune of 10 to 15 percent. But over here, that percentage rose drastically in some cases.
Gripe
The gripe lay in the fact that, as usual, some mediocre to terrible films were acclaimed generously by the “intellectual” media, the ubiquitous social media and some niche audiences: like the OTT releases Stolen, Mrs. and Costao (the last seemingly hyped by some merely because it featured Nawazuddin Siddiqui)!
On the other hand, deserving big-screen films like The Diplomat (average at the b-o.), Sky Force (which faced unwanted brickbats), Ground Zero, Emergency and Loveyapa surely deserved better accolades and box-office viewing. One can also add Superboys of Malegaon to this list.
Knots and Crosses!
Bhool Chuk Maaf and Maa, both eminently mediocre films, still did modest business because of their themes, says trade analyst Komal Nahta, though the former’s b-o. collections were slightly “fed” (as in exaggerated). Nahta also says that while Jatt opened exceedingly well but slid quickly, Kesari 2 and Housefull 5 were endorsed ain the movie-halls but remain losing propositions in the larger picture of Return on Investment (ROI), that is monetary recovery of costs. After Chhaava, therefore, Raid 2 is the biggest hit and Sitaare Zameen Par might match or overtake it.
The OTT situation
Undoubtedly, Dhoom Dhaam (Netflix) remains the standout film, quality-wise, with The Mehta Boys, Phule and The Storyteller ranking as films that had rich stories but very limited box-office appeal. The same was much the case with Dil Dosti Aur Dogs. Detective Sherdil too was a breezy entertainer. Jewel Thief—The Heist Begins was a hardboiled commercial leave-your-brains-for-a-break-and-enjoy kind of thriller.
Acing it!
Across the board, for me, Sky Force, The Diplomat, Dhoom Dhaam, Raid 2 and Sitaare Zameen Par remain the best of them all with Chhaava ranking next.
From the performances, I would place Ajay Devgn and Riteish Deshmukh (Raid 2), Vicky Kaushal and Akshaye Khanna (Chhaava), Aamir Khan and all the actors playing the specially-abled students who are all newcomers (Rishi Shahani, GopiKrishnan K. Verma, Aayush Bhansali, Vedant Sharma, Samvit Desai, Naman Misra, Ashish Pendse, Aroush Dutta and Rishabh Jain), Akshay Kumar (Sky Force), Paresh Rawal and Adil Hussain (The Storyteller), Boman Irani (Housefull 5), Pratik Gandhi (Dhoom Dhaam), Vinay Pathak (Phule), Junaid Khan and Ashutosh Rana (Loveyapa) and John Abraham (The Diplomat) at the top of the male heap.
The distaff side was led by Genelia Deshmukh and Simran Mangeshkar (Sitaare…), Yami Gautam Dhar (Dhoom Dhaam), Sadia Khateeb (The Diplomat), Patralekhaa (Phule) and Wamiqa Gabbi (Bhool Chuk Maaf) and Kajol (Maa).
The directors who excelled mainly included debutants (Abhishek Anil Kapur, Sandeep Kewlani in Sky Force, Karan Singh Tyagi in Kesari 2, Rishab Seth in Dhoom Dhaam, who also directed the gripping series, Mistry, released on the last Friday of June) and Kangana Ranaut (Emergency). Scoring high were Shivam Nair (The Diplomat), R.S. Prasanna (Sitaare…), Laxman Utekar (Chhaava), Ananth Mahadevan (The Storyteller) and Advait Chandan (Loveyapa). The big names were all missing though!
Musically, however, the year continued to be uniformly disastrous, and happily, July has begun on a good musical note with Metro…In Dino. Technically, however, we made giant strides in Cinematography, associated fields DI and VFX, Sound and Production Design.
As always, one optimistically hopes that the Hindi film graph goes up…and up in the next six months, both qualitatively and commercially. Happily, there was no competition from the hype that was South Indian cinema, as atrocities like Thug Life and other (mostly) below-par films fell by the pan-Indian wayside.
But the correction should not be token, like Aamir Khan avoiding the OTT release as of now (palliation at best!), and the industry must take serious notes of, primarily, both the production costs and even more important, the viewing cost. And, of course, the firm belief that music is a staple ingredient for us Indians, and the three quotients—Entertainment, Emotional and (optionally) Intelligence Quotients must remain in perfect proportions.
