The Michael Jackson biopic evolved from a $150 million film into a near-$200 million Hollywood gamble after legal complications triggered costly reshoots, restructuring and discussions of a multi-part release.
This is not just a show. It is a case study in how to save a dying cinematic universe by doing the exact opposite of everything Hollywood has taught us about superhero content.
This is not just a film. It is a stress test for the question that has haunted Hollywood for a decade: can cinemas still create must-watch events in the streaming era?
Ramayana is not just a film. It is a ₹4,000 crore bet on the proposition that Indian mythology, mounted at global scale, can travel anywhere—and pay for itself along the way.
In the winter of 2023, a 74‑year‑old single‑screen theatre in Mumbai's Grant Road district was about to close. The Alfred Theatre, a fading art‑deco relic with a cracked façade, worn velvet seats, and a projection system that had not been upgraded since the early 2000s, had been losing money for years. Its owner, the third generation of a family that had operated the theatre since 1949, had been negotiating with a real‑estate developer who wanted to demolish the building and replace it with a residential tower. The deal was essentially done. The Alfred was going to join the thousands of single‑screen theatres that had been shuttered across India over the past two decades—the casualties of the multiplex revolution, the streaming disruption, and the simple, brutal economics of operating a 900‑seat cinema in an era when the average multiplex auditorium held 200.
The video appeared on a Tuesday evening in March, uploaded to a fringe pornography site and then, within hours, circulated across WhatsApp groups, Telegram channels, and X. It showed a famous Bollywood actress—one of the most recognisable faces in the country, a woman whose image had been licensed to a dozen major brands, whose endorsement portfolio was valued at over ₹200 crore—engaged in an explicit sexual act. The video was, of course, entirely fabricated. The actress's face had been digitally mapped onto the body of a performer in an existing pornographic video using deepfake technology—the same generative‑AI tools that can now produce photorealistic synthetic media with a sophistication that makes detection difficult and attribution nearly impossible. The actress's legal team sent takedown notices to every platform that was hosting the video. Most of them complied, eventually, but the video had already been downloaded, copied, and re‑uploaded thousands of times. It is still circulating. It will probably circulate forever.
For more than forty years, the Indian film industry has been defined by a simple geographic binary: Mumbai for Bollywood, Hyderabad and Chennai for the South. Delhi, the national capital, the seat of government, the city that gave Indian cinema some of its most iconic locations—India Gate, the Qutub Minar, the bustling lanes of Chandni Chowk—has never been a production hub. The city has produced actors, directors, writers, and producers, but they have all, eventually, migrated to Mumbai. The capital's film infrastructure has been, for decades, a shambolic collection of decaying government studios and private facilities that were too small, too outdated, and too bureaucratically entangled to compete with the integrated production ecosystems of the western and southern states. Delhi was where films were set. It was never where films were made.
In June 2022, when the Board of Control for Cricket in India opened the digital rights for the Indian Premier League to a global auction, the outcome was treated, by most of the business press, as a moment of collective corporate insanity. The rights were sold for ₹23,758 crore—roughly $2.9 billion—to Viacom18, a Reliance‑backed media company that had never operated a major streaming platform and that had no obvious path to recouping an investment that was, by any conventional measure, economically irrational. The analysts who covered the media sector published notes with titles like "Winning the Auction, Losing the War." The executives at Disney+ Hotstar, which had lost the rights after dominating the IPL's digital audience for years, told journalists that the price made no sense. The conventional wisdom was unanimous: Reliance had overpaid. The market would punish the overpayment. The IPL rights were a trophy asset, and trophies are not investments.
In 2019, a Korean‑language romantic drama called Crash Landing on You was released on Netflix to a global audience that was, at the time, primarily Asian and diasporic. It was subtitled in over 30 languages, but it was not expected to travel well in India—a market that had, for decades, been defined by the dominance of local‑language content, by the cultural primacy of Bollywood, and by an audience that was assumed to be resistant to foreign‑language entertainment. The assumption was wrong. Crash Landing on You became the most‑watched international series on Netflix in India in 2020, and it launched a wave of Korean‑content consumption that has, in the six years since, reshaped the Indian streaming landscape. By Q1 2026, Korean content—dramas, films, reality shows—accounted for approximately 12 percent of all streaming hours consumed in India, a figure that is larger than the combined share of all other non‑Indian content. The K‑drama, which was once a niche enthusiasm for a small, digitally connected audience, has become a mainstream cultural force—and Bollywood, which spent the past decade worrying about Hollywood, has discovered that the real competition was coming from Seoul.
For most of Indian cinema's history, the Gujarati film industry has been an afterthought. It produced films for a regional audience that was assumed to be small, price‑sensitive, and culturally conservative—an audience that would watch a Gujarati film if it was convenient, but that would not seek one out. The industry's output was modest: a few dozen films a year, produced on shoestring budgets, screened in a handful of theatres, and forgotten within weeks of their release. The last time a Gujarati film had earned ₹100 crore at the box office was never—because no Gujarati film had ever done so. The industry was not in decline. It was in a state of permanent, unremarkable stasis.