Dhurandhar bulldozes box office, exposes widening gulf between critics, audiences

Dhurandhar, directed by Aditya Dhar and fronted by Ranveer Singh, has delivered one of the most emphatic box office statements in recent Hindi cinema, crossing ₹100 crore in its third weekend alone and racing towards the ₹1,000 crore mark worldwide.

Released on 5 December, the Bollywood film has shown exceptional legs, with collections accelerating rather than tapering off, an increasingly rare phenomenon in the post-pandemic theatrical landscape. By Day 17, the film had crossed ₹579 crore nett in India and touched ₹870 crore globally, powered by sustained footfalls, repeat viewings and a sharp disconnect between critical reception and audience response.

A muscular political thriller with mass appeal

Dhurandhar is a high-octane political thriller that blends intelligence operations, covert warfare and statecraft into a tightly wound narrative set against contemporary security challenges.

Ranveer Singh plays a driven intelligence operative navigating moral grey zones, with Akshaye Khanna cast as a calculating strategist, Sanjay Dutt as a hard-edged power broker and R. Madhavan and Arjun Rampal anchoring rival ideological and institutional poles.

Director Aditya Dhar, known for Uri: The Surgical Strike, doubles down on scale and urgency, favouring a propulsive screenplay over subtle allegory. The film’s unapologetically assertive tone, nationalist framing and emphasis on state power have resonated strongly with mass audiences across metros and smaller centres alike.

Industry tracking suggests the film sold around 9.6 million tickets on BookMyShow within 17 days, while overseas markets, particularly North America, the Gulf and Australia, delivered unusually robust returns for a politically charged Hindi film.

Endorsement, backlash, response: How the debate unfolded

Contrary to the impression created by social media noise, Dhurandhar did not become successful because of controversy. Its commercial momentum was already firmly established before online polemics entered the picture.

Political figures, strategic commentators and sections of the defence and security community publicly praised the film’s themes and execution, framing it as a confident assertion of India’s geopolitical worldview. These endorsements, though less algorithmically amplified, played a role in normalising the film’s ideological stance for mainstream audiences.

Criticism followed a predictable arc. Several film reviewers questioned the film’s politics, tone and portrayal of institutions, labelling it reductive or propagandist. However, these critiques failed to dent box office momentum and, in some cases, appeared increasingly detached from audience sentiment.

The controversy escalated when the Film Critics Guild issued a statement defending the legitimacy of criticism. The intervention backfired. The guild, headed by Anupama Chopra, was criticised for appearing to shield its own members — many of whom had authored the reviews under fire — rather than engaging with the substance of audience backlash.

For many viewers, the episode reinforced a long-simmering perception that sections of film criticism function as a closed circuit, resistant to dissent and uncomfortable with mass rejection of elite consensus.

Only after the film had already dominated the box office did YouTuber Dhruv Rathee release a video attacking Dhurandhar as propaganda. By that stage, the debate had largely moved on. The video became loud online but did not shape the film’s trajectory, serving more as a late-stage echo in an already polarised conversation.

Editorial take

To be objective, the central premise that Pakistan has harboured terrorist groups for decades cannot reasonably be dismissed as propaganda. It is a well-established fact in contemporary global affairs. From the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight IC-814 to the 26/11 Mumbai attacks — events directly referenced or alluded to in the film — the historical record is neither disputed nor ambiguous.

Where Dhurandhar is more open to criticism is in its creative choices rather than its political assumptions. The film offers a surprisingly sanitised visual treatment of parts of urban Karachi, glosses over the lived reality of women in Pakistan, and softens the portrayal of figures such as Rehman Dakait, who in real life was far more brutal — with three wives and thirteen children — than his cinematic version suggests.

There are also factual and cultural lapses that attentive viewers noticed. A statement attributed in the film to General Zia-ul-Haq — "bleeding India through a thousand cuts" — was, in fact, made by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto.

The Urdu spoken by several characters is not only flawed — with jarring utterances like jazbaaton and naakaamyaab — but also not the Lyari dialect, flattening linguistic texture in a narrative that otherwise insists on authenticity.

Yet, this is where much of the criticism begins to collapse under its own contradictions. If a film rooted in covert warfare, intelligence operations and muscular statecraft is not allowed to exhibit what its detractors deride as “raw masculinity”, it is unclear what aesthetic or emotional register such cinema is expected to inhabit. The demand that Dhurandhar be both politically assertive and tonally restrained reflects less a cinematic critique than an ideological discomfort with the genre itself.

What Dhurandhar really signals

The success of Dhurandhar is less about one film and more about a structural shift.

Audiences no longer wait for critical validation before embracing or rejecting cinema. Political messaging, once assumed to be a liability for commercial films, has become a draw when aligned with prevailing public sentiment. At the same time, traditional arbiters of taste appear increasingly ill-equipped to influence outcomes beyond their own circles.

The film’s run has exposed a widening gap between:

• Urban critical discourse and mass audience appetite
• Institutional criticism and popular legitimacy
• Cultural gatekeeping and market reality

Dhurandhar has not ended the debate. It has rendered certain voices less decisive.

As theatres remain full well into the third week of the film's release and overseas collections continue to climb, the film stands as a reminder that in contemporary Hindi cinema, the final verdict no longer comes from review columns or guild statements, but from ticket counters and repeat audiences.