The Bollywood spy thriller has become the single most commercially dominant force in contemporary Indian cinema, and its rise tells a story far larger than box office numbers. When a nation that spent decades producing romantic musicals and family dramas suddenly begins pouring its creative energy into espionage narratives, something fundamental has shifted in the collective psyche. The spy thriller is not merely a genre Indians enjoy watching; it is the genre through which India processes its deepest anxieties about borders, identity, loyalty, and the invisible wars fought in its name by people whose names the public will never know.
This ranking argues a specific position: the best Bollywood spy thrillers are not the ones with the most spectacular action sequences or the biggest opening weekends, though several films on this list deliver both. The best Bollywood spy thrillers are the ones that use espionage as a lens for examining questions that no other genre can ask. What happens to a person who lives a lie for a decade? What does a nation owe the agents it sends into darkness? When does patriotism become propaganda, and does the distinction even matter when the threat is real? These are the questions that separate a great spy thriller from a merely entertaining one, and they are the questions that drive this ranking from bottom to top. The Bollywood spy thriller did not emerge from nowhere. It evolved through distinct phases, each reflecting India’s changing relationship with its own intelligence apparatus, its geopolitical anxieties, and its appetite for stories that operate in moral gray zones. Understanding that evolution is essential to understanding why the films at the top of this ranking earn their positions, and why the films at the bottom, despite their commercial success, fall short of what the genre is capable of achieving.
The trajectory from Farz to Dhurandhar is not merely a journey of improving production values or bigger budgets. It is a journey from fantasy to realism, from escapism to confrontation, from treating espionage as a costume to treating it as a psychological condition. To explore the complete box office journey of these films interactively, the commercial data reveals just how dramatically audience appetite for spy cinema has expanded in the past decade. What was once a niche subgenre has become the engine that drives the entire Bollywood box office machine, and the reasons for that transformation are as much cultural and political as they are cinematic.
Consider the scale of the shift. In the decade before Ek Tha Tiger launched the YRF Spy Universe, not a single Bollywood spy film ranked among the year’s top five earners. In the decade since, spy thrillers have dominated the box office with a consistency that no other genre can match: Pathaan, Dhurandhar, War, Tiger Zinda Hai, and now Dhurandhar 2 have all claimed the title of highest-grossing Hindi film of their respective release years, and several have held the all-time record. This commercial dominance reflects a cultural appetite that has structural rather than cyclical causes. India’s middle class has expanded, its media consumption has globalized, its geopolitical awareness has intensified, and its relationship with its own security apparatus has evolved from ignorance to fascination. The spy thriller serves all of these developments simultaneously: it provides the action spectacle that competes with Hollywood imports, the patriotic resonance that connects to national identity, the geopolitical sophistication that reflects an educated audience’s understanding of regional tensions, and the psychological complexity that the streaming era has taught audiences to expect. The genre is not merely popular. It is structurally positioned at the intersection of every major trend shaping contemporary Indian cinema, and understanding its current dominance requires examining not just the individual films but the cultural ecosystem that produced them.
The ranking that follows evaluates seventeen films against six explicit criteria. The films are ranked from bottom to top, with the lowest-ranked entries appearing first and the genre’s finest achievements last. Every position is argued, not assumed, and the reader is invited to disagree with specific placements while engaging with the analytical framework that produced them. What this ranking cannot capture in a numbered list, it attempts to capture in the prose surrounding each entry: the relationships between films, the creative debts they owe to predecessors, the lessons they taught the industry, and the specific ways in which each film expanded or contracted the genre’s possibilities for those that followed.
The Evolution of Espionage in Indian Cinema
The history of Bollywood spy cinema begins not with a whisper but with a wink. The 1960s and 1970s produced a string of Hindi espionage films that borrowed liberally from the James Bond template without understanding what made Bond work beyond the surface glamour. Farz (1967), starring Jeetendra, gave audiences a suave Indian agent who fought villains in exotic locations while romancing beautiful women, and it was successful enough to establish a formula. The film’s famous song “Mast Baharon Ka Main Aashiq” became a cultural touchstone, but the espionage elements were decorative rather than structural. The spy was a costume, not a character. Ankhen (1968), Jewel Thief (1967), and a string of similar productions followed the same pattern: Indian heroes in Western-style thriller plots, with the intelligence apparatus serving as a convenient excuse for globe-trotting adventure rather than a subject of genuine dramatic interest.
The 1970s saw the spy film recede as the Amitabh Bachchan-led angry young man genre consumed Bollywood’s creative attention. When espionage did appear, it was typically subordinated to romance or action rather than treated as a genre with its own dramatic logic. The 1980s and early 1990s continued this pattern, with occasional entries like Prahaar (1991) touching on military intelligence themes but never committing fully to the espionage framework. Indian cinema had not yet found its own voice in the spy genre because it had not yet reckoned with the real-world intelligence landscape that would eventually provide the genre’s raw material: the RAW-ISI rivalry, the Kashmir insurgency, the cross-border terrorism that would culminate in the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, and the decade-long covert operations that the Indian public suspected existed but could never confirm.
The late 1990s produced one film that deserves recognition as the genre’s most important pre-modern ancestor. Sarfarosh (1999), starring Aamir Khan as a police officer investigating weapons smuggling linked to Pakistani intelligence, was not technically a spy film, but it established the tonal template that the entire modern Bollywood espionage genre would eventually adopt. The film treated the India-Pakistan intelligence rivalry with a seriousness that previous Bollywood productions had not attempted, grounding its conflict in recognizable institutional dynamics rather than fantasy villainy. Naseeruddin Shah’s performance as a ghazal singer with concealed ISI connections demonstrated what the genre would later discover at scale: that the most compelling antagonists in Indian spy cinema are not moustache-twirling terrorists but cultured, sympathetic individuals whose loyalties happen to lie on the other side of the border. Sarfarosh did not create the modern Bollywood spy thriller, but it proved that the raw materials existed and that audiences were ready for narratives that engaged with India’s security anxieties through character drama rather than spectacle.
The early 2000s saw tentative experiments that would bear fruit later. Lakshya (2004), Farhan Akhtar’s Kargil War drama, was not a spy film but its commitment to showing military operations with procedural authenticity influenced the intelligence cinema that followed. The film’s box office underperformance, a problem shared by many Bollywood films that deserved better commercial results, delayed the industry’s recognition that audiences were ready for grounded military and intelligence narratives, but the creative seeds Lakshya planted would eventually germinate in Baby, Uri, and Dhurandhar. Simultaneously, the proliferation of 24-hour news channels and the internet meant that ordinary Indians were consuming more information about terrorism, intelligence operations, and cross-border tensions than any previous generation. The gap between what Indians knew about their security environment and what Bollywood was willing to dramatize had become untenable. Something had to give, and it did.
The turning point arrived not with a spy film but with a geopolitical event. The 1999 Kargil War, followed by the 2001 Indian Parliament attack and the devastating 2008 Mumbai attacks, created a cultural environment in which Indian audiences were ready to engage with espionage narratives that felt grounded in recognizable geopolitical reality. Suddenly, the stakes of intelligence work were not abstract; they were personal. Every Indian who watched the live television coverage of 26/11 understood, at a visceral level, what intelligence failure meant. The spy thriller could no longer be a fantasy. It had to reckon with real fears, real enemies, and real consequences.
The YRF Spy Universe, launched with Ek Tha Tiger in 2012, was Bollywood’s first attempt to build a commercially viable espionage franchise, and its approach was revealing. Aditya Chopra understood that Indian audiences wanted spy cinema, but he bet that they wanted it wrapped in the familiar comforts of Bollywood stardom, romance, and spectacle. Salman Khan’s Tiger was not a psychologically complex operative; he was a superhero in a RAW uniform. The formula worked commercially, generating four films and a crossover universe, but it also established a ceiling: the YRF Spy Universe traded authenticity for accessibility, and by the time Tiger 3 arrived, audiences had begun to sense the limitations of that trade.
The real revolution came from two directions simultaneously. Neeraj Pandey’s Baby (2015) proved that an Indian spy thriller could operate with procedural precision, treating intelligence work as a profession rather than a personality. Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi (2018) proved that the genre could sustain a female protagonist whose espionage was not about physical combat but about emotional sacrifice, and whose mission’s moral cost was the film’s actual subject. These two films expanded the genre’s dramatic vocabulary in ways that made Dhurandhar possible.
And then Dhurandhar arrived. Aditya Dhar’s franchise did not merely raise the bar for Bollywood spy cinema; it relocated the bar to a different building entirely. By committing to a decade-long undercover narrative, by centering the psychological destruction of its protagonist rather than his physical triumphs, and by refusing to offer the audience the comfortable certainty that the mission was worth its cost, Dhurandhar transformed the Bollywood spy thriller from a subgenre into the defining cinematic expression of contemporary India’s geopolitical consciousness. The complete analysis of how Dhurandhar changed Bollywood reveals the full scope of this transformation, but for the purposes of this ranking, the franchise’s impact is simple: it divided Bollywood spy cinema into “before Dhurandhar” and “after Dhurandhar,” and every film on this list must now be evaluated in relation to the standard it set.
The Ranking Criteria
Before presenting the ranking, the criteria must be made explicit. Too many film rankings operate on unstated preferences, allowing the writer to shuffle entries arbitrarily without accountability. This ranking evaluates every Bollywood spy thriller against six specific dimensions, and each film’s position reflects its aggregate performance across all six.
The first criterion is intelligence authenticity: does the espionage feel real? This does not require documentary accuracy, but it does require internal consistency. A spy film loses credibility when its protagonist performs physically impossible stunts without consequence, when intelligence agencies operate without institutional constraints, or when the film treats tradecraft as magic rather than procedure. Baby scores high on this criterion because its operations feel like operations. Tiger 3 scores low because its protagonist operates more like a video game character than a covert agent.
The second criterion is narrative sophistication: does the plot reward attention? The best spy thrillers are puzzles that the audience solves alongside the protagonist, or mysteries whose revelations recontextualize everything that preceded them. A spy film that telegraphs its twists or relies on coincidence rather than intelligence-driven plotting fails this criterion regardless of how exciting its action sequences may be.
The third criterion is action integration: is the violence purposeful? The difference between great action and decorative action is whether the physical confrontations advance the narrative, reveal character, and carry consequences. When Hamza fights in Dhurandhar’s Lyari sequences, every punch has a narrative reason. When Tiger dispatches dozens of anonymous henchmen in Tiger 3, the violence is spectacular but dramatically inert.
The fourth criterion is performance depth: do the spies feel like people? Espionage demands extraordinary acting because the character is, by definition, performing a role within the story. The best spy film performances capture the exhaustion and moral erosion of sustained deception, the way living a lie eventually contaminates the truth beneath it. The worst reduce the spy to a collection of cool poses and confident one-liners.
The fifth criterion is cultural specificity: is this recognizably Indian espionage? The best Bollywood spy thrillers are not Indian versions of Hollywood spy films; they are explorations of distinctly Indian geopolitical tensions, institutional cultures, and emotional landscapes. The RAW-ISI rivalry, the weight of Partition, the specific pain of cross-border terrorism, the tension between democratic oversight and covert necessity; these are the raw materials that distinguish Bollywood espionage from its global counterparts.
The sixth criterion is lasting impact: did this film change the genre? A spy thriller that entertains in the moment but leaves no trace on the genre’s evolution ranks lower than one that permanently expanded what Bollywood espionage could be, even if the latter film has flaws that the former avoids.
These six criteria are not weighted equally for every film. A film that scores exceptionally on intelligence authenticity and narrative sophistication but only adequately on action integration (Madras Cafe) can outrank a film that delivers spectacular action but fails on authenticity and performance depth (Tiger 3). The ranking rewards ambition over execution in borderline cases, because the history of the genre demonstrates that ambitious failures teach the industry more than competent repetitions. Agent Vinod’s commercially disappointing experiment with narrative complexity contributed more to the genre’s evolution than Force 2’s competent but unremarkable action thriller formula. A ranking that only rewarded box office performance would look very different from this one, and it would be a less useful guide to the genre’s artistic achievement.
One additional principle governs this ranking: the Dhurandhar franchise is evaluated as two separate films rather than a single entity, because Part 1 and Part 2 accomplish fundamentally different things within the spy thriller framework. Part 1 is a slow-burn infiltration narrative whose tension derives from the constant threat of exposure. Part 2 is a psychological demolition study whose power derives from the consequences of that infiltration. Both are extraordinary achievements, but they are extraordinary in different ways, and ranking them as a single unit would obscure the specific qualities that make each one work. The detailed Part 1 vs Part 2 comparison examines these differences in full.
The Definitive Ranking
17. Aiyaary
Neeraj Pandey’s follow-up to Baby and the Naam Shabana spin-off arrived with enormous expectations and departed with almost none of them met. The film attempts to construct a labyrinthine military intelligence plot involving a rogue operative played by Sidharth Malhotra and his mentor played by Manoj Bajpayee, and the premise contains genuine dramatic potential. A student turning against a teacher within the closed world of military intelligence is a framework that could sustain serious tension. The problem is execution: Aiyaary’s plot is not complex so much as convoluted, substituting narrative confusion for narrative sophistication. The audience does not solve a puzzle alongside the characters; they wait for exposition scenes to explain what just happened. Malhotra, who would later prove his dramatic range in Shershaah, struggles here with a character whose motivations remain opaque not because the film is withholding information strategically but because it has not fully worked out what drives the man. Bajpayee brings his characteristic intensity, but even he cannot animate a script that treats intelligence work as a series of PowerPoint presentations rather than a lived experience. The film’s Delhi and London locations are photographed without the textural specificity that distinguished Baby’s approach to real spaces, and the action sequences feel interpolated rather than integrated. Aiyaary earns its position at the bottom of this ranking not because it is unwatchable but because it represents a missed opportunity: the talent involved could have produced something far more interesting if the screenplay had been willing to commit to a single clear dramatic idea rather than attempting to juggle half a dozen underdeveloped ones.
16. Romeo Akbar Walter
Romeo Akbar Walter operates in the pre-Dhurandhar mode of Bollywood spy filmmaking, where the espionage framework serves primarily as a vehicle for patriotic sentiment rather than psychological exploration. John Abraham plays Romeo, a RAW agent sent undercover in Pakistan during the 1971 war, and the film wants desperately to be a serious intelligence drama but cannot resist the gravitational pull of conventional Bollywood narrative mechanics. The first act establishes Romeo’s recruitment with reasonable procedural credibility, showing how intelligence agencies identify and cultivate assets from unlikely backgrounds. Abraham brings his characteristic physical stillness to the role, and in his best moments, he conveys the contained tension of a man who knows that any mistake will cost him his life. But the film progressively abandons its procedural discipline in favor of increasingly improbable plot developments, and by the climax, the careful intelligence work of the first act has been replaced by the kind of heroic action that belongs in a different genre entirely. The film’s treatment of Pakistan lacks the specificity that would have grounded its espionage in recognizable geography and culture; its Pakistani characters are types rather than people, and its Islamabad and Karachi feel like sets rather than cities. Compare this to Dhurandhar’s Karachi underworld, which builds Lyari into a living ecosystem with its own power hierarchies, economies, and rhythms, and Romeo Akbar Walter’s limitations become clear. The film aspires to authenticity but settles for approximation, and in a genre that has since proven how much deeper authenticity can go, approximation is no longer sufficient.
15. Force 2
John Abraham returns to spy territory in Force 2, playing a RAW agent investigating the murders of Indian operatives in China. The film pairs Abraham with Sonakshi Sinha as a fellow agent, and their partnership provides the film’s most engaging dynamic: two professionals whose competence is established through action rather than exposition, working a dangerous case in hostile territory with minimal institutional support. Director Abhinay Deo brings a clean visual style to the proceedings, and the Budapest and Mumbai locations (standing in for various settings) are shot with enough specificity to create a sense of place. The action choreography, particularly a rooftop chase sequence through European streets, achieves a physical intensity that reflects Abraham’s commitment to performing his own stunts, and there is a climactic fight that earns its brutality because the narrative has established genuine stakes. Where Force 2 falls short is in its screenplay’s reluctance to complicate its moral landscape. The villains are uncomplicated, the heroes are uncomplicated, and the intelligence work, while competently staged, never generates the kind of ambiguity that distinguishes great spy cinema from competent action filmmaking. The film also struggles with tonal inconsistency, shifting between procedural seriousness and action-movie bombast without fully committing to either register. Force 2 is a solid entertainment that never transcends its genre mechanics, which places it firmly in the middle-lower tier of this ranking.
14. Bellbottom
Akshay Kumar’s Bellbottom attempts something that Bollywood spy cinema rarely attempts: a period espionage film set in the 1980s that uses a real hijacking incident as its narrative foundation. The film dramatizes a RAW operation to rescue passengers from a hijacked Indian Airlines plane, and its period setting provides both visual charm and narrative constraint. The 1980s production design, costuming, and technology create a convincing analog-era atmosphere where intelligence work depends on human ingenuity rather than digital surveillance, and this constraint forces the film to engage with espionage as a human endeavor rather than a technological one. The absence of satellite phones, encrypted communications, and real-time surveillance data means that the operatives must rely on face-to-face meetings, physical message drops, and the kind of interpersonal tradecraft that digital-era spy films rarely depict. This analog espionage creates a different kind of tension: slower, more dependent on human judgment, and more vulnerable to the kind of miscommunication that technology has largely eliminated from modern intelligence operations.
Kumar, who has built a career playing patriotic heroes, brings reliable screen presence but does not stretch beyond his established register; his RAW analyst is competent and determined but psychologically uncomplicated. The performance functions within the film’s commercial requirements without transcending them, which is a limitation but not a fatal one for a film whose primary ambition is genre competence rather than genre transformation. The supporting cast, including Vaani Kapoor and Huma Qureshi, serve their narrative functions without transcending them, though Qureshi’s role as a figure within the host country’s political establishment provides moments of genuine dramatic tension when her character’s dual loyalties come under pressure.
Where Bellbottom distinguishes itself from lower-ranked entries is in its structural discipline: the hijacking creates a natural ticking clock, the operation has clear objectives and genuine obstacles, and the resolution, while simplified from historical reality, follows an internal logic that rewards the audience’s attention. The film’s commitment to a single, well-defined objective, rescuing the hostages without triggering an international incident, gives it a narrative focus that more ambitious but less disciplined spy films sometimes lack. The real events that inspired the film provide a historical anchor that grounds the espionage in verifiable geopolitical context, even as the film takes liberties with specific details for dramatic effect.
The film’s pandemic-era theatrical release limited its commercial impact, but as a genre exercise, Bellbottom demonstrates that Bollywood spy cinema gains energy when it constrains itself to specific, real-world parameters rather than reaching for globe-spanning fantasy. The period setting also serves as a reminder that Indian intelligence has been conducting covert operations for decades, and that the genre’s historical range extends far beyond the post-26/11 era that dominates contemporary spy cinema. A Bollywood spy film set during the 1965 war, or the 1971 Bangladesh liberation, or the Cold War alignment politics of the 1970s, would find rich material in the intelligence history that Bellbottom only begins to explore.
13. Naam Shabana
The Baby spin-off and prequel focuses on Taapsee Pannu’s Shabana character, tracing her journey from civilian tragedy to RAW operative, and the film’s strongest contribution to Bollywood spy cinema is its commitment to centering a female intelligence agent whose capabilities are physical, intellectual, and emotional in equal measure. Pannu brings fierce commitment to the role, and the training sequences, in which Shabana transforms from a grieving young woman into a lethal operative, carry genuine dramatic weight because the film takes the time to show what the transformation costs her psychologically, not just physically. The hand-to-hand combat sequences are choreographed with a rawness that reflects Shabana’s fighting style: efficient, brutal, and shaped by survival instinct rather than martial arts elegance. Director Shivam Nair stages several set pieces with competent tension, particularly an undercover operation in a Goa hotel that generates suspense from the constant threat of exposure rather than from action choreography. Where Naam Shabana falters is in its screenplay’s need to subordinate Shabana’s agency to the male intelligence establishment. Despite being her story, the film repeatedly pulls focus to Akshay Kumar’s Ajay Singh Rajput and Manoj Bajpayee’s Ranvir Singh, reducing Shabana to a talented operative within a hierarchy she never challenges. The narrative would have been stronger if it had trusted Shabana to carry the film’s moral weight without supervision. Nevertheless, Naam Shabana earns its ranking for advancing the genre’s gender representation and for proving that audiences would accept a female-led spy narrative, a lesson that Raazi would shortly prove on a far grander commercial and artistic scale, and that Alpha now promises to expand even further within the YRF Spy Universe framework.
12. Agent Vinod
Sriram Raghavan’s Agent Vinod is the most underrated spy film in Bollywood’s modern era, a work of genuine formal ambition that was dismissed upon release for being “confusing” when it was actually demanding. Raghavan, who would go on to create Andhadhun and prove himself Bollywood’s most distinctive thriller director, brought to Agent Vinod the same narrative restlessness that characterizes all his work: the refusal to explain what the audience can infer, the willingness to let plot threads dangle until they become relevant three scenes later, and the conviction that a spy film should feel as disorienting to the viewer as espionage feels to its practitioners. Saif Ali Khan’s Vinod is not a conventional Bollywood hero; he is a weary professional who moves through a plot of deliberately labyrinthine complexity involving nuclear weapons, Latvian connections, and Pakistani intelligence, and Khan plays him with a cynicism that was unusual for the era. The film’s globe-trotting structure, moving from Moscow to Riga to Karachi to Delhi to Morocco, anticipates the geographical ambition that would later define the YRF Spy Universe’s approach, but Raghavan uses each location as a narrative environment with its own rules rather than as a backdrop for action set pieces. The Karachi sequences, in particular, achieve a street-level texture that predates Dhurandhar’s Lyari world-building by over a decade. Where Agent Vinod struggles is in its tonal management; Raghavan’s instinct for dark comedy occasionally clashes with the film’s thriller mechanics, and Kareena Kapoor Khan’s character is underwritten relative to the screen time she occupies. But viewed in retrospect, Agent Vinod was ahead of its time: a Bollywood spy film that trusted its audience to keep up, demanded attention rather than rewarding passivity, and treated espionage as a profession conducted by fallible, exhausted human beings rather than invincible stars. The film deserved better than it received, and its rehabilitation among critics and fans in the years since its release confirms what Raghavan’s subsequent career has proven beyond doubt: that narrative intelligence and commercial success are not inherently opposed, but that the audience sometimes needs time to catch up with a filmmaker’s ambitions. Agent Vinod’s critical rehabilitation also underscores a broader pattern in Bollywood spy cinema: the genre’s most artistically ambitious entries frequently underperform upon initial release, only to gain appreciation as subsequent films demonstrate that the innovations they attempted were not flaws but previews of where the genre was heading. Madras Cafe, Agent Vinod, and even the original Baby all earned their reputations gradually rather than instantly, and the willingness to take creative risks that may not pay off commercially in the opening weekend is what distinguishes directors who change Indian cinema from directors who merely participate in it.
11. Phantom
Kabir Khan’s Phantom occupies a unique position in Bollywood spy cinema as a film that was effectively banned in Pakistan, prompted a real lawsuit, and articulated a national fantasy so specific that it became a geopolitical incident. The film imagines what might have happened if India had sent a covert team to assassinate the perpetrators of the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and its willingness to name real people and real organizations (however thinly fictionalized) gave it an urgency that purely fictional spy thrillers cannot replicate. Saif Ali Khan returns to espionage territory as Daniyal Khan, a disgraced Indian soldier recruited for the operation, and his performance here is markedly different from Agent Vinod: less cynical, more driven, carrying the grief of 26/11 as personal motivation rather than professional obligation. Katrina Kaif’s Nawaz Mistry provides a competent humanitarian-cover partner whose own backstory connects to the Mumbai attacks through family loss, grounding the global operation in personal stakes. Khan (the director) stages the assassinations across multiple countries with procedural specificity, and the film’s best sequences balance the logistical challenge of covert killing with the moral weight of extrajudicial execution. The Chicago and London segments demonstrate effective tradecraft staging, and the climactic operation generates genuine tension. Phantom’s limitation is the gap between its real-world ambition and its narrative resolution; the film wants to satisfy the audience’s desire for justice while acknowledging the moral complexity of state-sanctioned assassination, and these objectives pull in opposite directions. The result is a film that is braver than its structure ultimately supports. But Phantom’s contribution to the genre is significant: it proved that Bollywood spy cinema could engage directly with India’s most traumatic contemporary event without retreating into allegory or abstraction, and it established the template for the post-26/11 intelligence thriller that Dhurandhar would later perfect. The film’s willingness to depict the assassinations of real (or thinly fictionalized) individuals, including a figure clearly modeled on Hafiz Saeed, gave the narrative a specificity and urgency that purely fictional spy plots cannot generate. When the audience watches Daniyal Khan plan an operation against a target they recognize from news coverage, the espionage ceases to be a dramatic exercise and becomes a collective act of imagined justice, a cultural response to a national wound that the legal and diplomatic systems have failed to address. This function, spy cinema as collective therapeutic fantasy grounded in real grievance, is unique to the Indian context and represents one of the genre’s most distinctive contributions to global espionage storytelling. No Hollywood spy film carries this specific weight, because no Hollywood audience experiences the unresolved proximity of a live, ongoing terrorist threat from a neighboring nation in the way that Indian audiences do. Phantom’s limitations prevent it from ranking higher, but its cultural significance within the genre exceeds what its artistic execution alone would justify.
10. D-Day
Nikhil Advani’s D-Day is the Bollywood spy film that most directly anticipated Dhurandhar’s approach to Karachi as a dramatic setting, and rewatching it after the Dhurandhar franchise reveals both how prescient it was and how much further Dhurandhar would eventually take the same ideas. The film follows a RAW team sent to capture a Dawood Ibrahim analog (Goldman, played by Rishi Kapoor in one of his finest late-career performances) from his Karachi fortress, and the operation unfolds with a procedural patience unusual for a Bollywood action film. Irrfan Khan’s Wali Khan, a broken operative who has spent years undercover in Karachi and lost himself in the process, is the film’s most Dhurandhar-adjacent element: a man whose cover identity has become more real than his original self, who drinks too much and trusts too little, and whose loyalty to India is genuine but whose ability to act on it has been corroded by years of deception. Khan brings his characteristic understatement to the role, communicating volumes through silence and exhaustion, and his performance remains one of the most psychologically credible portrayals of deep-cover work in Bollywood history. The specific moments that distinguish Khan’s performance are the ones where Wali’s two identities collide in real time: a scene in which he must report to his RAW handler while maintaining his local cover requires Khan to shift between languages, body postures, and emotional registers within seconds, and the transition is so seamless that the audience understands, viscerally, that Wali has been performing this shift for so long that it has become autonomous rather than conscious.
Arjun Rampal’s Rudra Pratap Singh, the operational lead, provides the physical authority the mission requires, while Huma Qureshi’s Noor, a local Karachi woman caught between factions, adds the civilian perspective that grounds the intelligence operation in human consequence. Noor’s character is significant because she represents the people whose lives are disrupted when intelligence agencies conduct operations in their neighborhoods, and her presence forces the film to acknowledge that covert operations produce civilian casualties that the operational planners do not include in their cost-benefit calculations.
Rishi Kapoor’s Goldman is the revelation: a charming, paranoid, culturally omnivorous crime lord whose Karachi is a kingdom he rules through a combination of money, violence, and political patronage. Kapoor plays Goldman with a combination of bonhomie and menace that makes every scene unpredictable: the character can transition from genial host to lethal threat without any visible emotional shift, and this unpredictability is what makes Goldman the most fully realized villain in Bollywood spy cinema before Dhurandhar. The character anticipates both Rehman Dakait and SP Choudhary Aslam in the Dhurandhar franchise, and the portrayal of Karachi’s criminal underworld in D-Day established the precedent that Dhurandhar would later expand into full cinematic world-building.
The film’s gangster cinema dimensions connect it to Bollywood’s broader underworld storytelling tradition, and D-Day’s Goldman sequences can be viewed as a bridge between the Satya-Company-Vaastav gangster cycle and Dhurandhar’s intelligence-gangster hybrid. D-Day’s limitations are structural: the ensemble approach diffuses dramatic focus across too many characters, and the film’s climax sacrifices the procedural credibility of its first two acts for action-movie spectacle. But as a step in the genre’s evolution toward authenticity and psychological depth, D-Day is essential.
9. Madras Cafe
Shoojit Sircar’s Madras Cafe is the Bollywood spy film that most stubbornly refuses to entertain, and that refusal is precisely what makes it so important. Set against the backdrop of the Sri Lankan civil war and the LTTE’s assassination of Rajiv Gandhi (thinly fictionalized), the film follows a RAW officer (John Abraham) embedded in the conflict who gradually realizes that the intelligence he is gathering is being used for purposes he cannot control and outcomes he cannot prevent. Abraham delivers what remains his most restrained and dramatically effective performance, playing a man whose professional competence is systematically undermined by institutional bureaucracy, political calculation, and the sheer impossibility of controlling events in a civil war that has its own logic. The performance works because Abraham strips away every instinct toward physical heroism; his RAW officer does not save the day, does not execute a brilliant operation, does not deliver a cathartic climax. He watches, reports, advocates for intervention, and is ignored. The helplessness is the point, and Abraham plays it with a quiet desperation that communicates the specific frustration of a professional who can see what is about to happen and cannot convince anyone with the power to act that he is right.
Sircar directs with a documentary-influenced aesthetic that strips the spy thriller of its glamour: the handheld cameras, the de-saturated color palette, the ambient sound design that uses silence more effectively than most films use explosions. The Sri Lankan locations (recreated with enough specificity to prompt protests from the Tamil diaspora, which is itself evidence of how seriously the film engaged with its subject matter) achieve a lived-in quality that anchors the intelligence work in physical reality. The film’s moral universe is relentlessly specific: every character operates within constraints that limit their options, and the tragedy is not that anyone acts out of malice but that everyone acts rationally within their constraints and the aggregate result is catastrophic. This is a profoundly grown-up understanding of intelligence failure, one that recognizes that intelligence agencies do not fail because they are staffed by incompetent people but because the systems they operate within are designed for objectives that may not include preventing the specific catastrophe unfolding in front of them.
Nargis Fakhri’s journalist character provides an outsider’s perspective that illuminates the information gap between what intelligence agencies know and what the public is told. Her investigation, running parallel to the RAW operation, shows how the same events look completely different depending on whether you are inside or outside the intelligence apparatus. This dual perspective is structurally important because it prevents the film from becoming a conventional institutional drama; instead, it operates as a meditation on how information asymmetry shapes political outcomes, and how the public’s ignorance of intelligence activities is not an accident but a feature of the system.
Madras Cafe’s commercial underperformance upon release was predictable; it is a demanding, deliberately unglamorous film that asks its audience to sit with moral discomfort rather than offering cathartic resolution. The assassination is not prevented. The intelligence officer is not vindicated. The system does not work. This is not what most audiences go to Bollywood spy films to experience, but it is what the genre needs to remain honest. Madras Cafe earns its position in the top ten because it is the only Bollywood spy film that treats intelligence failure with the seriousness it deserves, and because its influence on subsequent spy filmmaking, from Baby’s procedural discipline to Dhurandhar’s moral complexity, is larger than its box office suggests. The film also connects to the broader tradition of Bollywood war movies through its treatment of the Sri Lankan conflict, and its refusal to simplify that conflict into a conventional good-vs-evil framework makes it the most politically mature entry in both genres.
8. Ek Tha Tiger
The film that launched the YRF Spy Universe and proved that Bollywood spy cinema could generate genuine blockbuster-level box office returns deserves recognition for what it accomplished commercially and culturally, even as subsequent entries have exposed its dramatic limitations. Kabir Khan’s direction establishes the Spy Universe’s visual template: glossy international locations, cleanly choreographed action sequences, and a tonal register that balances thriller mechanics with romantic comedy warmth. Salman Khan’s Tiger is not a psychologically complex character, and the film does not pretend otherwise; Tiger is a star vehicle, and Khan’s screen presence carries the film through narrative moments that would collapse under less charismatic performers. But the film’s genuine innovation is Katrina Kaif’s Zoya, a Pakistani ISI agent who becomes Tiger’s love interest and, eventually, his partner. The cross-border romance is the franchise’s emotional core, and Ek Tha Tiger handles it with more sincerity than its detractors acknowledge: the idea that two intelligence operatives from rival nations could choose love over duty is sentimental, but the film earns its sentiment by showing what both characters sacrifice for the choice.
The action sequences, particularly a chase through Istanbul that integrates practical stunts with location shooting, established a production-value benchmark that Hindi cinema had not previously reached in the spy genre. The Istanbul rooftop chase deploys Salman Khan’s physical presence with impressive efficiency, using the city’s layered architecture, its mosques, its bazaars, its harborfront, as both backdrop and obstacle course in ways that give the sequence a geographic specificity that later franchise entries would struggle to match. The hand-to-hand combat in the film’s climactic factory sequence, while less polished than the choreography in War or Dhurandhar, carries the raw energy of a star who commits fully to physical performance, and the sequence’s emotional stakes, Tiger fighting to protect the woman he has chosen over his country, elevate the violence beyond pure spectacle.
The commercial success, crossing the 200 crore mark and becoming one of the biggest hits of its year, demonstrated to the industry that spy cinema could compete with the traditionally dominant genres of romance and family drama. More importantly, Ek Tha Tiger established the audience expectation that Bollywood spy films should look expensive, should move across international locations, and should combine physical action with romantic stakes. These expectations were not revolutionary in global cinema, but in Hindi cinema they represented a significant expansion of what the spy genre was permitted to attempt. The film’s weaknesses, its simplistic characterization, its failure to engage seriously with the moral implications of cross-border espionage, its treatment of intelligence work as a vehicle for star charisma rather than a subject worthy of investigation, would become more apparent as the genre matured. But without Ek Tha Tiger’s commercial proof of concept, neither Baby nor Raazi nor Dhurandhar would have been greenlit with the budgets and creative ambition they required.
Ek Tha Tiger ranks at number eight because it is a better film than its successors within the franchise (Tiger Zinda Hai excepted), because it made the genre viable at scale, and because its cross-border romance contains a genuine emotional idea even if the film does not explore that idea with the depth it deserves. To track day-wise collection trends for the entire YRF franchise is to see how Ek Tha Tiger established the commercial floor that every subsequent spy film has built upon.
7. Tiger Zinda Hai
The best film in the YRF Spy Universe is not Pathaan, despite that film’s bigger box office and more celebrated star. Tiger Zinda Hai succeeds where most franchise entries fail because it finds a genuine dramatic situation and lets the espionage framework serve the story rather than the other way around. The premise, a hostage rescue of Indian and Pakistani nurses from an ISIS-controlled hospital in Iraq, provides a natural structure that the film exploits with impressive discipline. Director Ali Abbas Zafar stages the operation as a multi-phase tactical challenge, and the film’s best sequences derive tension not from superhuman heroics but from the logistical problems of extracting forty hostages from a fortified position with limited personnel and no official support. Salman Khan’s Tiger is still an invincible figure whose combat skills stretch credulity, but the film gives him something more interesting to do with his invincibility: protect people who cannot protect themselves, in a situation where brute force alone cannot solve the problem. Katrina Kaif’s Zoya receives her most substantial role in the franchise, functioning as a co-equal operative whose tactical intelligence complements Tiger’s physical dominance, and their partnership in the operation’s planning stages carries more dramatic weight than their romantic scenes. The film’s treatment of the Indian and Pakistani nurses as a combined group, united by shared captivity rather than divided by nationality, provides the thematic counterpoint to the franchise’s otherwise conventional patriotic framework. The action choreography, particularly a climactic battle in the hospital compound, achieves a scale and coherence that remains the franchise’s action high point. Tiger Zinda Hai earns its ranking because it demonstrates what the YRF formula can achieve when it is disciplined by a strong situational premise and when the spectacle serves the stakes rather than replacing them. It is the film that proved the franchise could sustain dramatic tension, not just star power, and its 340+ crore domestic collection confirmed that audiences rewarded the effort. The film’s influence extends beyond its franchise: Tiger Zinda Hai’s ensemble structure, in which Tiger assembles a team of Indian and Pakistani operatives who must cooperate despite mutual suspicion, established a template for multi-character intelligence narratives that subsequent films, including Baby’s team dynamic and Dhurandhar’s institutional ensemble, would develop in more sophisticated directions. The hostage rescue premise also gave the franchise its strongest thematic statement: that the real enemy is not a nation but an ideology, and that the people caught in between, the nurses, the hostages, the civilians, are what intelligence work exists to protect. This is a more nuanced moral framework than the franchise typically operates within, and it is what elevates Tiger Zinda Hai above both its predecessor and its successor in this ranking. The war films tradition in Bollywood shares Tiger Zinda Hai’s preoccupation with rescue operations and the ethics of military intervention, and the film’s treatment of its ISIS antagonists, brutal but not reduced to caricature, suggests that the YRF franchise is capable of engaging with moral complexity when its scripts provide the foundation for it.
6. War
War is the YRF Spy Universe entry that comes closest to solving the franchise’s central creative problem: how to combine the star-driven spectacle that sells tickets with the dramatic tension that sustains a narrative. The solution, casting Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff as mentor and protege on opposite sides of a loyalty crisis, works because both actors bring distinct physical vocabularies to their roles and because the film structures their conflict as both a personal betrayal and an institutional crisis. Hrithik’s Kabir, a senior RAW operative who has apparently gone rogue, carries a weariness that the actor has rarely deployed this effectively; his physicality, usually deployed for dazzling choreography, is here channeled into controlled violence that suggests a man who knows exactly how much damage he can do and is tired of doing it. The way Hrithik carries Kabir’s body tells a story that the dialogue does not: the slightly lowered shoulders, the economy of movement that conserves energy for the moments when violence is actually necessary, the gaze that evaluates every person in every room for threat level. This is not the Hrithik Roshan of Krrish or Bang Bang; this is an actor who has learned that restraint is more compelling than spectacle, and the learning is visible on screen.
Tiger Shroff’s Khalid provides the audience’s point of view, a loyal agent whose certainty about his mission is progressively undermined as Kabir’s true motivations emerge. Shroff’s limitations as a dramatic actor are offset by his extraordinary physical ability, and director Siddharth Anand wisely structures Khalid’s emotional arc through action rather than dialogue: the character’s transformation from obedient soldier to independent thinker is expressed through the changing dynamics of his fight sequences with Kabir, from the first confrontation where Khalid fights with institutional righteousness to the final battle where he fights with personal anguish. The physical storytelling compensates for the screenplay’s emotional thinness, and the result is a character arc that functions better in motion than in conversation.
Director Siddharth Anand stages the action with a clarity and energy that distinguishes War from the franchise’s other entries: a motorcycle chase through Portuguese streets that uses the city’s hills, tunnels, and waterfront with geographic precision; a fight on a cargo plane that exploits the confined space and shifting gravity for maximum physical impact; and the climactic hand-to-hand confrontation between the two leads, which achieves an emotional intensity that the film’s dialogue scenes cannot match because the actors communicate more effectively through their bodies than through their words. The twist, when it arrives, reconfigures the narrative with enough logical consistency to reward the audience’s attention rather than insulting it. The revelation that Kabir’s rogue status is not what it appears transforms the film from a straightforward chase narrative into a more interesting study of how institutional deception operates at every level, from the agent in the field to the handler at headquarters.
War’s limitation is its emotional shallowness; the film is so committed to its action-set-piece structure that it never fully develops the psychology of either character beyond their surface motivations. Kabir’s rogue turn has a reason, but the reason is explained rather than felt. Khalid’s loyalty crisis is resolved rather than explored. The Bollywood vs Hollywood action comparison reveals that War represents Bollywood’s closest approach to the Hollywood franchise action template, which is both its strength (precision, spectacle, star charisma) and its limitation (emotional thinness, character simplification). War earns its ranking because its action filmmaking is the best in the YRF stable and because its structural innovation, the mentor-protege betrayal framework, gave the franchise its most dramatically interesting premise. The film’s Rs 475+ crore worldwide collection confirmed that the franchise could sustain commercial success independent of Salman Khan’s star power, a finding that would prove crucial for the franchise’s long-term viability.
5. Pathaan
Shah Rukh Khan’s return to cinema after a four-year absence produced the biggest opening day in Bollywood history at the time and the franchise’s most complete commercial triumph, but Pathaan’s position at number five rather than higher reflects the gap between its commercial achievement and its artistic ambition. The film is superbly entertaining, a machine-tooled blockbuster that delivers exactly what its audience wants with impeccable timing and scale. Khan’s Pathaan is the spy as rock star: cool under pressure, physically commanding despite the actor’s age, equipped with a backstory involving abandonment and patriotic redemption that gives the character just enough emotional depth to sustain empathy without slowing the plot. The performance is significant not for its psychological depth but for its demonstration of how star power can carry an intelligence narrative through sheer charisma: Khan makes Pathaan feel dangerous and charming simultaneously, and his ability to shift from deadpan comedy to intense physical confrontation without tonal whiplash is a technical skill that most actors cannot replicate.
Deepika Padukone’s Rubina, a former Pakistani agent working with Pathaan, provides a capable partner whose own intelligence background makes her more than a love interest, though the film does not develop her character with the depth her professional credentials suggest. The film’s most interesting decision is giving Rubina her own operational competence independent of Pathaan’s, allowing their partnership to function as a collaboration between equals rather than a rescue dynamic. John Abraham’s Jim, the antagonist and former RAW operative turned mercenary, brings a physical menace that gives the action sequences genuine opposition rather than disposable villainy. Abraham’s Jim is motivated by a specific grievance against the Indian intelligence establishment, and while the film does not explore this grievance with the depth it deserves, the presence of a rational motivation elevates Jim above the franchise’s typical villain roster.
Director Siddharth Anand applies the lessons of War to a bigger canvas, staging action across Arctic, aerial, and urban environments with a confidence that reflects Hollywood-competitive production values. The Arctic train sequence, in which Pathaan and Rubina fight their way through a moving train surrounded by snow-covered mountains, achieves a visual grandeur that few Bollywood action sequences have matched, combining practical stunts with digital enhancement in proportions that sustain physical credibility. The Tiger cameo, connecting the film to the broader Spy Universe, generates a communal theatrical moment that transcends its narrative function; when Salman Khan’s Tiger appears alongside Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan, the moment functions less as a plot point than as a cultural event, two generations of Bollywood stardom occupying the same frame in the service of a franchise that has successfully merged their respective fan bases.
Pathaan earns its position because it does everything a franchise spy blockbuster should do, and it does it at a level of execution that few Bollywood films have matched. But it ranks below the top four because it does not attempt what those films attempt: psychological depth, moral ambiguity, the willingness to let the audience sit with discomfort rather than satisfaction. Pathaan is a celebration of the spy as hero. The films ranked above it understand that the spy as hero is a comforting fiction that conceals a far darker truth. The film’s Rs 1,055 crore worldwide collection and its status as the franchise’s commercial peak confirmed that the audience appetite for polished spy entertainment remains enormous, and its success gave the industry confidence that the genre could sustain multiple franchise models simultaneously, with the YRF approach and the Dhurandhar approach serving different segments of the same market.
4. Baby
Neeraj Pandey’s Baby is the film that proved Bollywood could make a spy thriller that operated like a Swiss watch: precise, efficient, and entirely uninterested in the ornamental gestures that typically distinguish Hindi cinema from its global counterparts. There are no songs. There are no romantic subplots. There are no family melodrama interludes. There is only the operation: a counter-terrorism unit tracking a sleeper cell across multiple countries, using human intelligence, surveillance, and patient tradecraft to dismantle a network before it can execute an attack on Indian soil. Akshay Kumar’s Ajay Singh Rajput leads the team with a calm professionalism that represents a radical departure from the actor’s typical on-screen persona; this is not the Akshay Kumar of Khiladi or Rowdy Rathore but a reserved, strategically minded intelligence officer whose violence is surgical rather than spectacular. The performance is so controlled that its power becomes apparent only in contrast to Kumar’s other work: the actor who built a career on physicality and comic timing here subordinates both to the character’s institutional discipline, and the restraint itself becomes the performance.
The supporting cast, including Anupam Kher as the intelligence chief and Kay Kay Menon as a veteran operative, creates an ensemble texture that distributes dramatic weight across the team rather than concentrating it in a single star. Kher’s intelligence director brings a bureaucratic authority that grounds the film in institutional reality: his decisions are shaped not only by operational necessity but by political consideration, budgetary constraint, and the perpetual tension between intelligence agencies that cooperate in theory but compete in practice. Menon’s Feroz Ali Khan, an experienced field operative whose methods are rougher and more morally ambiguous than Rajput’s, provides the film’s most interesting ethical tension: the question of whether intelligence professionals who cut corners produce better results, and whether those results justify the corners cut. Danny Denzongpa’s brief but memorable appearance as the intelligence establishment’s elder statesman adds institutional weight, suggesting a continuity of intelligence work that extends decades before and after the film’s specific operation.
The film’s best sequence, a prolonged operation in Istanbul to extract a terror suspect from a foreign country without diplomatic cover, unfolds with the kind of procedural patience that most Bollywood films would consider commercial suicide: the stakeouts, the surveillance, the careful coordination, the split-second decisions that could compromise the entire mission. Pandey stages the Istanbul sequence with a documentary-adjacent restraint that trusts the audience to find tension in competence rather than chaos. The suspect is located, approached, and extracted through a series of carefully planned moves that feel like actual intelligence work: identifying the target’s routines, mapping his environment, establishing the extraction route, positioning team members at critical points, and executing the grab with a precision that minimizes the risk of exposure. When violence does erupt, it feels like operational failure rather than action spectacle, and the team’s reaction to the violence, disciplined but genuinely frightened, is more realistic than the superheroic confidence of comparable sequences in other films. Pandey trusts that the tension inherent in competent professionals performing dangerous work is more compelling than choreographed fight sequences, and he is right.
The Nepal sequence, in which the team must locate and neutralize a high-value target in a crowded urban environment, demonstrates how effective action filmmaking can be when every gunshot has a consequence and every tactical decision carries risk. The sequence’s most revealing moment comes not during the violence itself but during the planning phase, when Rajput and his team debate the approach, weigh the risks, and acknowledge the possibility that the operation might fail. This acknowledgment of vulnerability, routine in real intelligence work but almost unprecedented in Bollywood spy cinema at the time, is what gives Baby its distinctive texture. The heroes are not invincible; they are good at their jobs, and being good at their jobs is terrifying because the jobs they are good at involve killing people and risking death in return.
Baby’s influence on subsequent Bollywood spy cinema cannot be overstated. It established the procedural standard that Dhurandhar would later elevate into art, and it proved that Indian audiences would embrace a spy film that respected their intelligence by refusing to explain what the characters would already know. The film’s commercial success, a hit by the standards of its era and budget, gave the industry confidence that the audience for sophisticated espionage cinema existed and was larger than anyone had assumed. Without Baby’s demonstration that Bollywood spy cinema could function as procedural thriller rather than masala entertainment, the creative space that allowed Dhurandhar to exist would not have been available.
3. Raazi
Meghna Gulzar’s Raazi occupies a singular position in Bollywood spy cinema as the only film that makes the act of espionage itself the source of horror rather than heroism. Alia Bhatt’s Sehmat is not a trained operative; she is a twenty-year-old Kashmiri woman who marries into a Pakistani military family at her dying father’s request, carrying secrets across the border at a cost that the film refuses to romanticize or sentimentalize. The genius of Raazi’s construction is that it asks the audience to root for Sehmat’s success while simultaneously showing them, in granular emotional detail, what that success requires: the betrayal of people who have genuinely welcomed her into their family, the corruption of intimacy itself as every private moment becomes an intelligence-gathering opportunity, and the progressive destruction of the very humanity that makes Sehmat worth caring about.
Bhatt delivers what remains the finest performance in any Bollywood spy film, a portrayal of escalating moral disintegration that never loses the character’s essential decency even as that decency is systematically weaponized by her handlers and her mission. The performance operates on multiple simultaneous registers that Bhatt manages with astonishing precision: Sehmat the dutiful daughter carrying out her father’s dying wish, Sehmat the intelligence asset following operational protocol, Sehmat the new bride navigating an unfamiliar domestic environment, and Sehmat the increasingly terrified young woman who recognizes that the person she is becoming is not the person she agreed to be. Bhatt transitions between these registers within individual scenes, sometimes within individual shots, and the transitions are so fluid that the audience experiences the character’s fragmentation as it happens rather than observing it from a distance. The scene in which Sehmat realizes that her intelligence has led to the death of someone she loves, and that her loyalty to India required that death, is the single most devastating moment in the genre’s history: a woman alone in a bathroom, trying to wash blood off her hands that is not literally there, breaking apart with the knowledge that she has become what she was sent to destroy.
Gulzar’s direction achieves its effects through restraint rather than spectacle. The camera observes Sehmat with a steady, compassionate attention that refuses to sensationalize her situation. The Pakistani household is filmed with the warm light and domestic texture of a family drama, which is precisely the point: Sehmat’s espionage takes place not in safe houses and dark alleys but in kitchens, bedrooms, and dining rooms, the spaces where intimacy is built and, in Sehmat’s case, simultaneously exploited. The visual strategy makes the espionage feel like a violation of domestic sacred space rather than a professional operation, and this violation is what gives the film its moral weight.
Vicky Kaushal’s Iqbal, Sehmat’s Pakistani husband, is the film’s most quietly revolutionary element: a man who is kind, honorable, and genuinely in love with his wife, whose only crime is serving his country as faithfully as Sehmat serves hers. By making the “enemy” a good man, Gulzar dismantles the foundational assumption of most Bollywood spy cinema, that the other side’s people are less human, less worthy of empathy, less entitled to loyalty. Kaushal plays Iqbal with a gentleness that makes every one of Sehmat’s betrayals feel personal rather than political, and the film’s moral complexity depends on the audience’s inability to dismiss Iqbal as a villain who deserves what happens to him. He does not deserve it. He is a casualty of the same geopolitical logic that created Sehmat, and the film insists that the audience sit with that recognition rather than escaping into the comfort of patriotic certainty.
The supporting cast deepens the film’s ethical architecture. Rajit Kapur’s Hidayat Khan, Sehmat’s father, launches the entire operation by asking his dying daughter to continue a family tradition of cross-border espionage, and the film’s ambiguity about whether this request represents patriotic sacrifice or parental manipulation is never resolved. Jaideep Ahlawat’s Khalid Mir, Sehmat’s RAW handler, provides institutional competence without institutional warmth; he manages Sehmat as an asset rather than a person, and his professional efficiency becomes its own form of moral indictment.
The film’s 200+ crore collection proved, spectacularly, that audiences would embrace a spy thriller driven by emotional nuance rather than action spectacle, led by a female protagonist, and built around moral complexity rather than patriotic certainty. Raazi changed the conversation about what Bollywood spy cinema could achieve, and its influence on how patriotic films approach moral ambiguity is immeasurable. The only films that rank above it are the ones that took the space Raazi opened and pushed even further into the psychological darkness that espionage demands.
2. Dhurandhar: The Revenge
The sequel that should not have worked as well as it did. Part two of a spy duology faces an almost impossible structural challenge: the cover is blown, the mystery is resolved, and the careful infiltration that sustained Part 1’s tension has been replaced by the consequences of that infiltration, which are inherently less suspenseful because they are kinetic rather than covert. Aditya Dhar solves this problem by recognizing that Part 2’s subject is not the operation but the operative: what happens to a man who has lived as someone else for a decade when the lie collapses and both his identities, the real one and the constructed one, are destroyed simultaneously. Ranveer Singh’s Hamza in Part 2 is a different character from the Hamza of Part 1, not because the writing changes him arbitrarily but because ten years of deception have metabolized. The Hamza who fights his way out of Karachi is not the Jaskirat who entered it; he is a third person, someone who is neither the boy from Pathankot nor the gangster from Lyari but a composite whose psychological coherence has been shattered by the demands of his mission. Singh plays this fragmentation with extraordinary precision, shifting between registers within single scenes, allowing Jaskirat’s rage and Hamza’s calculation to coexist in the same body without either resolving into the other. The deep analysis of Ranveer Singh’s career-best performance examines the technical details of this achievement more fully, but for the purposes of this ranking, what matters is that Part 2 contains the single greatest acting performance in any Bollywood spy film. Sanjay Dutt’s expanded role as the primary antagonist provides the narrative with a physical and psychological opponent worthy of Hamza’s transformation, and the action sequences, which escalate dramatically from Part 1’s constrained violence, earn their spectacle because the emotional stakes are proportional to the visual scale. The film’s 1,000+ crore net crossing confirms what the content demonstrates: audiences will pay premium prices for spy cinema that treats them as adults. Part 2 ranks at number two rather than number one because its achievements, while extraordinary, are dependent on the foundation Part 1 established. Without the patient infiltration of Part 1, Part 2’s emotional devastation would lack context. The sequel is the payoff. The original is the investment that makes the payoff meaningful.
1. Dhurandhar
The number one position belongs to Dhurandhar not because it is the highest-grossing spy film in Bollywood history, though it is. Not because it features the most spectacular action sequences, though several of its set pieces rank among the genre’s finest. Dhurandhar earns the top position because it is the only Bollywood spy film that takes its own premise seriously enough to follow it to its logical conclusion: if a nation sends a young man to live as someone else in a hostile country for a decade, the man who returns, if he returns, will not be the same person who left, and the nation that sent him will not know what to do with what it created. Aditya Dhar’s direction achieves something that no other Bollywood filmmaker has attempted in the spy genre: the conversion of espionage from a plot mechanism into a psychological condition. The film’s Lyari sequences are not merely well-staged undercover scenes; they are a sustained immersion in what deep cover feels like from the inside, the daily calibration of language and gesture, the constant threat of exposure, the slow, corrosive realization that the performance is becoming the reality. The Dhurandhar complete movie analysis provides a comprehensive examination of every aspect of the film’s achievement, but the element that earns it the top ranking is its refusal to comfort the audience. The mission succeeds, but the cost of success is a human being. Jaskirat Singh Rangi entered Karachi. Hamza Ali Mazari emerged. Neither survived intact.
Ranveer Singh’s performance anchors the film’s psychological ambition with physical specificity: the way his posture shifts between Jaskirat’s remembered openness and Hamza’s acquired containment, the way his eyes register simultaneous calculations in two languages and two identities, the way his body, trained for violence in service of a country he cannot openly claim, moves through Lyari’s streets with a fluency that is itself a form of betrayal, because it means he has become what he was pretending to be. Consider the scene in which Hamza receives intelligence about an attack on Indian soil. The information arrives through his cover network, filtered through relationships he has built with people who trust him as a fellow Pakistani, as a fellow Muslim, as a member of their community. The camera holds on Singh’s face as he processes what he has learned, and what the audience sees is not the satisfaction of a successful intelligence operation but the anguish of a man whose entire life, his friendships, his loyalties, his daily routines, everything that makes existence bearable in a hostile environment, is built on a lie that this intelligence report demands he deepen rather than escape. Singh does not play this moment as heroic sacrifice; he plays it as existential horror, and the distinction is what separates Dhurandhar from every other spy film in this ranking.
The ensemble, from Akshaye Khanna’s chilling intelligence chief to R. Madhavan’s morally compromised handler to Sanjay Dutt’s terrifying antagonist to Arjun Rampal’s military intelligence officer, creates an ecosystem of power, deception, and institutional ruthlessness that rivals the finest espionage cinema in any language. Khanna’s Ajay Sanyal deserves particular attention: a man who sends agents into darkness with the same emotional detachment a chess player deploys when sacrificing a pawn, and whose brilliance is inseparable from his cruelty. The character analysis of Ajay Sanyal examines how Khanna builds this characterization through specific physical choices: the glasses that serve as both professorial prop and emotional barrier, the stillness that reads as calm to subordinates and menace to everyone else, the rare moments when genuine emotion cracks through the operational facade and reveals something that might be guilt or might be satisfaction, and the film never lets the audience be certain which.
The production design of Dhurandhar’s Karachi represents a world-building achievement that has no precedent in Bollywood spy cinema. Lyari is not a backdrop; it is a complete social ecosystem with its own power hierarchies (Rehman Dakait’s territorial dominance, the ISI’s shadowy oversight, the police’s compromised authority), its own economy (the drug trade, the protection rackets, the political patronage networks), its own cultural texture (the street food, the language, the code of loyalty and betrayal), and its own visual identity (the narrow streets, the crumbling balconies, the color palette of dust and blood and neon). When Hamza navigates this ecosystem, the audience understands that his survival depends not on combat skills but on social intelligence: the ability to read a room, to calibrate the correct level of deference toward Rehman Dakait, to maintain the precise emotional register that a man in his fictional position would maintain. This is espionage as anthropology, and it is what makes Dhurandhar the most immersive spy film in Bollywood history.
The action sequences in Dhurandhar serve the narrative rather than interrupting it. Each fight, each chase, each confrontation advances the story and reveals character in ways that pure spectacle cannot achieve. The violence is visceral and consequential: when Hamza fights, he fights with the desperate efficiency of a man whose survival depends on ending the confrontation quickly rather than winning it dramatically. Dhar’s camera stays close, refusing the wide shots that would transform the violence into spectacle, and the sound design emphasizes impact over choreographic elegance. The result is action that feels dangerous rather than exciting, which is precisely the point: in Dhurandhar’s world, violence is not a release but a reminder of what the mission has cost and will continue to cost.
Dhurandhar is not merely the best Bollywood spy thriller. It is the film that proved Bollywood spy cinema could compete, aesthetically and psychologically, with le Carre and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, with Zero Dark Thirty and Homeland, with the entire Western espionage tradition that assumed India had nothing comparable to offer. India had Dhurandhar. The genre will never be the same.
The YRF Spy Universe: A Franchise Model Examined
Aditya Chopra’s decision to build an interconnected spy franchise was, at the time, the most ambitious intellectual property strategy in Bollywood history. The complete YRF Spy Universe guide examines the franchise’s trajectory in full detail, but its significance for this ranking lies in what it reveals about the tension between franchise sustainability and creative ambition. The YRF model treated espionage as a brand: recurring characters, standardized production values, interconnected narratives, and the promise that each entry would deliver a familiar experience at a high level of polish. This approach produced commercial successes (Ek Tha Tiger, Tiger Zinda Hai, War, and the spectacular Pathaan) and one notable misfire (Tiger 3, whose formulaic plotting and autopilot performances suggested that the franchise had exhausted its formula without evolving its dramatic ambitions).
The franchise’s structural architecture deserves analysis as a business strategy independent of its individual films’ artistic merits. Chopra built the Spy Universe on a principle borrowed from Marvel Studios: that audience investment in a shared world creates commercial value that exceeds the sum of individual films. The Tiger-Pathaan cameo in Pathaan generated a theatrical moment whose cultural impact, measured in social media engagement, viral clips, and collective audience response, vastly exceeded what either character could have achieved in isolation. This is the franchise premium: the idea that interconnection multiplies audience excitement in ways that standalone narratives cannot replicate. The strategy worked brilliantly with Pathaan, whose Rs 1,055 crore worldwide collection was driven partly by the promise of the Tiger crossover and partly by the accumulated goodwill of the franchise’s previous entries. But the franchise premium has a shadow side: audience fatigue. Tiger 3’s underperformance, collecting significantly below franchise expectations despite Salman Khan’s star power and the Spy Universe’s brand recognition, demonstrated that interconnection can become a liability when the individual films stop delivering fresh dramatic experiences. The audience had seen Tiger fight terrorists twice before, and the third iteration, without a situational innovation comparable to Tiger Zinda Hai’s hostage rescue, failed to justify its franchise premium.
The crossover moments, particularly Pathaan’s Tiger cameo, generated theatrical events that transcended any individual film’s content, proving that Indian audiences were receptive to universe-building when the stars aligned. But the franchise’s creative ceiling is also its defining limitation. The YRF Spy Universe operates by rules that prohibit genuine psychological darkness: the heroes must remain fundamentally good, the violence must remain entertaining rather than disturbing, the moral questions must resolve in favor of institutional loyalty, and the stars must remain stars rather than disappearing into characters. These rules produce reliable entertainment but prevent the franchise from achieving what Dhurandhar achieves: the conversion of espionage from spectacle into psychological inquiry.
Aditya Dhar’s standalone duology model, which sacrificed franchise extensibility for narrative depth, ultimately proved that Indian audiences were ready for spy cinema that demanded more from them than the YRF model assumed. The Dhurandhar franchise has no crossover potential because its characters inhabit a world too psychologically specific to share with Tiger’s glossy universe. Hamza cannot meet Pathaan because they exist in different cinematic realities: one grounded in the messy, morally compromised texture of actual intelligence work, the other polished into the entertaining clarity of franchise entertainment. Both realities are legitimate, but the market’s response, with Dhurandhar’s franchise outgrossing the YRF Spy Universe’s individual entries, suggests that audiences increasingly prefer the grounded reality when the choice is available.
Whether Alpha, the franchise’s female-led entry with Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, can bridge this gap between franchise entertainment and artistic ambition remains the most interesting question in Bollywood spy cinema’s future. The casting of Bhatt, whose Raazi demonstrated the capacity for psychologically complex spy performances, within the YRF framework, which has historically prioritized spectacle over psychology, creates an intriguing creative tension. If Alpha can sustain the emotional depth that Bhatt brings to intelligence narratives while delivering the action spectacle that the Spy Universe promises, it could represent a genuine evolution of the franchise model. If it defaults to the franchise’s established formula, it will have wasted the most talented dramatic actress in Indian cinema on material that does not require her capabilities. The stakes are considerable, not just for the film’s box office but for the broader question of whether franchise filmmaking in India can accommodate artistic ambition or whether the two are structurally incompatible.
What Makes Bollywood Spy Thrillers Different From Hollywood
The fundamental difference between Bollywood and Hollywood spy cinema is not production value, although that gap has narrowed dramatically. The difference is what espionage represents in each culture’s storytelling. In Hollywood, the spy thriller is ultimately about the individual: a lone operative navigating institutional betrayal, personal identity crisis, and moral ambiguity in a world where the agency itself may be the enemy. Jason Bourne does not know who he is. Ethan Hunt is frequently disavowed by his own government. James Bond’s loyalty to MI6 is complicated by the knowledge that MI6 regularly lies to him. The Western spy thriller’s central anxiety is that the institutions meant to protect the nation are themselves corrupt, incompetent, or actively hostile to their own agents. In Bollywood, the spy thriller is about the nation: a collective enterprise in which individuals sacrifice personal identity, family connection, and psychological wholeness for a cause larger than themselves. The anxiety is not institutional corruption but institutional demand, the question of whether the nation has the right to ask this much of its citizens and whether the citizens have the right to refuse. When Hamza lives as someone else for a decade, the moral question is not whether RAW betrayed him but whether India had the right to create him. When Sehmat in Raazi marries across the border, the question is not whether Indian intelligence is competent but whether any intelligence objective justifies the destruction of a woman’s capacity for genuine human connection.
This philosophical difference produces different kinds of films. Hollywood spy cinema trends toward paranoid thrillers in which the hero trusts no one. Bollywood spy cinema trends toward sacrificial dramas in which the hero trusts the nation too much. Both anxieties are legitimate, and the films at the top of this ranking are the ones that engage with Bollywood’s particular version with the most honesty, complexity, and artistic ambition. The comparison between Bollywood and Hollywood action filmmaking reveals that these philosophical differences manifest not only in narrative structure but in choreography, visual language, and the very definition of what heroism looks like on screen.
The tonal register of espionage differs radically between the two industries. Hollywood’s post-Cold War spy cinema, from the Bourne trilogy through Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy to the Daniel Craig Bond films, has been marked by a pervasive cynicism about the espionage enterprise itself. The message is clear: the spy world is morally bankrupt, the sacrifices are wasted, and the institutions that demand them are unworthy of the loyalty they extract. This cynicism, while artistically productive, reflects a Western disillusionment with the intelligence establishment that has been building since the Church Committee hearings of the 1970s revealed the CIA’s domestic abuses. India has no equivalent historical reckoning with its intelligence agencies, partly because RAW and IB operate under far greater secrecy than their Western counterparts, and partly because the persistent reality of cross-border terrorism has sustained public support for aggressive intelligence operations in ways that the post-Vietnam, post-Iraq West no longer sustains. The result is that Bollywood spy cinema, even at its most critical (Raazi, Madras Cafe), retains a fundamental sympathy for the intelligence enterprise that Hollywood has largely abandoned. Dhurandhar’s genius is that it sustains this sympathy while simultaneously showing, in devastating detail, what the enterprise costs the individuals who serve it. The film does not question whether RAW should conduct covert operations; it questions whether RAW, or any institution, can conduct them without destroying the agents it deploys.
The enemy construction also diverges sharply. Hollywood spy cinema can afford to rotate its antagonists: Soviet agents in the Cold War era, Middle Eastern terrorists in the post-9/11 era, rogue elements within Western intelligence agencies in the contemporary era. Bollywood spy cinema returns obsessively to a single adversary: Pakistan, or more precisely, the ISI and the cross-border terrorism infrastructure that the Indian public believes Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus supports. This repetition is both the genre’s strength and its limitation. The strength is specificity: because the India-Pakistan rivalry is real, ongoing, and deeply personal for hundreds of millions of people, Bollywood spy films carry an emotional weight that Hollywood’s more abstracted antagonisms cannot match. An Indian audience watching Dhurandhar’s Karachi sequences is not processing a fictional geopolitical scenario; they are processing a version of a conflict that has shaped their lives, their politics, and their national identity for seven decades. The limitation is narrowness: the genre’s Pakistan fixation has prevented it from exploring other intelligence frontiers, the China border, internal insurgencies, maritime security, cyber warfare, that could enrich its dramatic vocabulary and broaden its thematic scope.
Where the Genre Falls Short
Honesty requires acknowledging the Bollywood spy thriller’s persistent shortcomings, even as the genre reaches new heights of commercial and artistic achievement. The most significant limitation is the genre’s relationship with propaganda. Too many Bollywood spy films, particularly those produced in the post-2019 political environment, treat patriotism as a substitute for characterization, as though a hero’s willingness to die for India is a personality rather than a motivation. Films like Tiger 3 coast on patriotic sentiment without earning it through dramatic complexity, and the result is entertainment that flatters the audience’s existing beliefs rather than challenging them to think more carefully about what national security actually costs. The finest films on this ranking, Dhurandhar, Raazi, and Baby, understand that genuine patriotism in cinema requires acknowledging the moral complexity of state action, not merely celebrating its results. The analysis of patriotic Bollywood cinema explores how the broader tradition of deshbhakti filmmaking has navigated this tension across seven decades, and the spy genre’s relationship to that tradition is particularly fraught because espionage, by definition, operates outside the legal and ethical frameworks that democratic societies claim to uphold.
The gender dimension remains a problem. Despite Raazi’s commercial and critical triumph, the Bollywood spy genre remains overwhelmingly male. Alpha promises a correction within the YRF framework, but the pipeline of female-led spy narratives beyond it is thin. Meghna Gulzar proved that audiences will embrace a female spy whose intelligence and emotional depth drive the narrative; the industry has been slow to learn the lesson. The absence is not merely representational but structural: female espionage experiences differ fundamentally from male ones, and an industry that explored those differences more systematically would discover dramatic territory that its competitors in Hollywood (Killing Eve, Alias, Zero Dark Thirty) have already begun to map. Sehmat’s espionage in Raazi exploits the domestic sphere, the intimacy of marriage, the trust of family, in ways that male spy narratives cannot replicate, and the genre would benefit enormously from more stories that explore how gender shapes the experience of deception, surveillance, and sacrifice.
The action-realism gap, while narrowing, persists. Even the best Bollywood spy films occasionally surrender to the gravitational pull of superheroic action, allowing their protagonists to perform feats that violate the physical credibility the film has spent acts establishing. Dhurandhar is not entirely immune to this tendency, though it manages it better than most. The issue is not that action sequences should be boring; it is that action sequences lose their dramatic impact when the audience stops believing that the protagonist can be hurt. Baby understood this instinctively: every gunshot in Baby carries consequence, and the team’s vulnerability is what makes their competence dramatically meaningful. When Tiger dispatches dozens of enemies without sustaining significant injury in Tiger 3, the action becomes a display rather than a story, and the audience’s engagement shifts from emotional investment to aesthetic appreciation. The evolution of Bollywood action cinema traces how this tension between spectacle and credibility has played out across decades.
The villain problem deserves specific attention. Too many Bollywood spy films construct their antagonists from ideological cardboard rather than dramatic complexity. The ISI handler, the Pakistani general, the terrorist mastermind: these figures appear in film after film without the psychological depth that would make them genuinely threatening. Threat in drama comes not from a character’s capacity for violence but from their capacity to be right, or at least comprehensible, in their motivations. The best spy cinema creates antagonists whose logic, while opposed to the protagonist’s, possesses its own internal coherence. Rishi Kapoor’s Goldman in D-Day achieved this. Akshaye Khanna’s Ajay Sanyal in Dhurandhar, while technically an ally rather than an antagonist, brings a moral ambiguity that functions as a more interesting form of opposition than any conventional villain. The genre needs more antagonists who are people rather than positions, whose opposition to the protagonist reflects genuine ideological or strategic disagreement rather than narrative convenience.
And the genre’s treatment of Pakistan, which provides the geopolitical backdrop for the majority of Bollywood spy cinema, remains a point of legitimate critical scrutiny. The best films on this ranking, Raazi in particular, complicate the India-Pakistan binary by creating Pakistani characters who are fully human. The worst treat Pakistan as a monolithic threat rather than a nation of individuals, reducing geopolitics to melodrama. Dhurandhar occupies a complex middle ground: its Lyari is richly textured and its Pakistani characters are three-dimensional, but the franchise’s overall narrative framing positions Pakistan as a source of existential threat to India in ways that leave little room for nuance at the macro level even as it achieves nuance at the micro level. The genre’s evolution suggests it is moving in the right direction, but the distance left to travel is significant. A Bollywood spy film set entirely within Pakistan’s own intelligence establishment, exploring the ISI’s internal politics and moral compromises from a Pakistani perspective, would represent a creative breakthrough that no filmmaker has yet attempted.
The Future of Bollywood Spy Cinema
The Dhurandhar franchise has established a new ceiling for what Bollywood spy cinema can achieve commercially, with the duology’s combined worldwide gross exceeding Rs 2,700 crore, numbers that reshape every conversation about Bollywood box office records. But commercial records are less interesting than creative trajectories, and the most important question facing the genre is whether the post-Dhurandhar era will produce filmmakers willing to match its ambition or an industry content to imitate its surface. The danger of the imitation impulse is real. After Uri’s success, Bollywood produced a wave of patriotic military films that copied Uri’s surface (jingoistic dialogue, nationalistic framing, the “josh” formula) without understanding what made Uri work (procedural discipline, escalating stakes, a director with genuine visual intelligence). The risk now is that the industry will greenlight a wave of Dhurandhar imitators, dark spy thrillers set in Pakistan with A-ratings and long runtimes, that reproduce the franchise’s aesthetic without its psychological depth or narrative ambition. The difference between Dhurandhar and a Dhurandhar imitation is not budget or star power; it is the willingness to follow the premise wherever it leads, even when it leads to places that are commercially risky, emotionally devastating, or politically uncomfortable.
The streaming platforms have already expanded the genre’s possibilities in ways that theatrical filmmakers must now acknowledge and either incorporate or differentiate from. The Family Man (Disney+ Hotstar) proved that the spy thriller format could sustain multi-season character development impossible within a two-and-a-half-hour film, and Special Ops demonstrated that ensemble intelligence narratives could find large audiences outside theatrical release. The boundary between film and streaming spy thrillers will continue to blur, and the best work in the genre may increasingly emerge from platforms willing to fund narratives too dark, too long, or too structurally ambitious for theatrical release. The relationship between theatrical and streaming spy content is not competitive but complementary: streaming series create audiences for theatrical spy films, and theatrical spy films create stars and production talent that streaming series recruit. The ecosystem is mutually reinforcing, and its expansion benefits every participant.
Regional-language spy cinema represents another frontier. If Bollywood’s spy genre draws its energy from India-Pakistan tensions, what might Tamil, Telugu, or Malayalam spy cinema explore? The LTTE conflict, the Chinese border tensions, the internal insurgencies, the maritime security challenges, each offers raw material for espionage narratives that Hindi cinema has barely touched. The emergence of pan-India distribution for non-Hindi films suggests that a Telugu or Tamil spy thriller with sufficient ambition could find a national audience. Goodachari, the Telugu spy thriller, demonstrated that the genre can work outside Hindi, and a Bollywood-scale investment in a regional-language espionage narrative could produce something genuinely unprecedented.
Alpha’s female-led approach within the YRF Spy Universe will test whether the franchise model can evolve beyond its masculine template, and the film’s performance will influence greenlighting decisions for years. If Alpha succeeds, the pipeline of female-led spy properties will expand; if it underperforms, the industry will likely retreat to its default male-protagonist comfort zone, regardless of what Raazi proved about audience appetite. The stakes of Alpha extend beyond a single film’s box office performance to the structural question of whose stories the genre is willing to tell.
The international dimension is also shifting. Dhurandhar’s North American box office performance, exceeding $20 million, demonstrated that Bollywood spy cinema can compete for diaspora dollars at levels previously reserved for pan-India spectacles like Baahubali. The genre’s appeal to the global Indian diaspora, which processes India-Pakistan tensions and intelligence anxieties through the specific lens of expatriate identity, creates a commercial cushion that other Bollywood genres do not enjoy. A spy film that earns Rs 600 crore domestically and $20 million in North America has a total economic profile that makes ambitious production budgets viable, and this viability encourages the creative investment that distinguishes the genre’s best entries from its mediocre ones.
The evolving filmmaking styles of Bollywood directors suggest that a new generation of filmmakers, informed by global streaming content and less beholden to traditional Bollywood formulas, will bring fresh perspectives to the genre. Aditya Dhar has confirmed that his next project will continue exploring intelligence and military themes, and his creative trajectory from Uri to Dhurandhar suggests that whatever he produces will push the genre’s boundaries further. But the genre’s future depends not on a single filmmaker but on whether the industry creates the conditions, the production budgets, the creative freedom, the willingness to greenlight risky projects, that allow multiple filmmakers to operate at the level of ambition that Dhurandhar has demonstrated is commercially viable. The Bollywood spy thriller has never been stronger, more commercially viable, or more artistically ambitious than it is right now. The question is whether the industry will treat Dhurandhar as a ceiling to be repeated or a floor to be built upon. The films that answer that question will define the next chapter of the ranking you have just read.
The Streaming Revolution and Its Impact on Spy Cinema
No honest assessment of Bollywood spy cinema can ignore the transformative impact of streaming platforms on the genre’s creative possibilities and audience expectations. The Family Man, Raj and DK’s Disney+ Hotstar series starring Manoj Bajpayee as Srikant Tiwari, a middle-class family man who moonlights as a TASC (Threat Analysis and Surveillance Cell) operative, accomplished something that no Bollywood spy film had previously managed: it created a fully rounded intelligence professional whose espionage career is not the entirety of his identity but one demanding dimension of a complex, often absurdly ordinary life. Bajpayee’s Srikant worries about his daughter’s school performance, argues with his wife about household chores, commutes in Mumbai traffic, and then interrogates terror suspects with the same tired professionalism. The genius of the characterization is that the mundane and the dangerous are not presented as contrasting registers but as simultaneous realities that Srikant navigates with the same pragmatic competence. The first two seasons established the series as one of the most acclaimed Indian originals on any platform, and the third season, which expanded the show’s geopolitical canvas while maintaining its distinctive balance of humor and high-stakes tension, confirmed the format’s creative vitality.
What The Family Man proved, and what theatrical spy films cannot easily replicate, is that the long-form streaming format is uniquely suited to espionage storytelling. Real intelligence work is not a two-hour sprint; it is a marathon of patience, bureaucratic negotiation, surveillance monotony, interpersonal manipulation, and rare moments of acute danger. The series format allows for the accumulation of detail that builds authentic texture: Srikant’s relationship with his team members evolves over episodes, the institutional politics of the intelligence agency are explored with a granularity that films cannot accommodate, and the personal consequences of his double life compound across seasons in ways that require narrative space. When Srikant’s marriage reaches crisis point in the second season, the emotional devastation lands with force because the audience has spent hours watching the incremental erosion caused by secrets and absences. A film would compress this into a montage. The series lets the audience live through it.
Special Ops, Neeraj Pandey’s Hotstar series, brought the procedural discipline of Baby to the streaming format and expanded it across two decades and nineteen years of intelligence work. Kay Kay Menon’s Himmat Singh, a RAW officer obsessed with connecting a series of terrorist attacks to a single mastermind, provided the template for the streaming spy protagonist as institutional lifer: a man whose entire identity has been consumed by his work, whose personal relationships have been sacrificed to operational demands, and whose vindication, when it finally arrives, comes too late to repair what the obsession has cost him. The series’ non-linear structure, jumping between past and present operations, demonstrated that streaming spy narratives could deploy formal ambition that theatrical releases, constrained by runtime and commercial pacing expectations, rarely attempt. The ensemble of operatives, each representing a different generation and approach to intelligence work, created the richest portrait of an Indian intelligence agency in any narrative format.
Citadel: Honey Bunny, Amazon’s Indian entry in the Citadel global franchise, brought international production resources to an Indian spy narrative, and while the results were mixed, with the global franchise architecture sometimes constraining the Indian story’s natural rhythms, the series demonstrated that Indian spy content could operate at production scales previously reserved for Hollywood originals. Varun Dhawan and Samantha Ruth Prabhu brought star presence to roles that required both action competence and emotional vulnerability, and the series’ willingness to embed the spy narrative within a family drama, a former spy couple whose past catches up with their domestic present, connected to the same thematic territory that The Family Man explores from a different angle: the impossibility of separating intelligence work from personal identity.
The streaming revolution has created a two-track system for Indian spy entertainment. Theatrical spy films (Dhurandhar, Pathaan, War) offer the communal spectacle, the massive action sequences, and the star-power events that require a big screen and a packed auditorium. Streaming spy series (The Family Man, Special Ops) offer the character depth, the procedural patience, and the narrative complexity that require hours of viewing time and the intimacy of a private screen. Neither format is inherently superior, but together they have expanded the audience for Indian espionage storytelling beyond anything the industry imagined a decade ago. The viewer who watches Dhurandhar in a theater on opening weekend is often the same viewer who binges The Family Man at home, and the expectations created by each format feed into the other. Theatrical spy films must now compete not only with each other but with the character depth that streaming audiences have come to expect, and streaming spy series must compete not only with each other but with the visual spectacle that theatrical audiences demand. This mutual pressure is driving both formats toward higher standards, and the beneficiary is the audience.
The Spy Thriller and Indian Masculinity
The Bollywood spy thriller has become, perhaps unintentionally, the genre that most directly interrogates contemporary Indian masculinity. The evolution of the spy protagonist from Jeetendra’s suave playboy in Farz to Salman Khan’s invincible action hero in the Tiger franchise to Ranveer Singh’s psychologically fractured operative in Dhurandhar maps a parallel evolution in what Indian cinema considers heroic. The YRF Spy Universe defines heroism through physical dominance: Tiger and Pathaan are men whose bodies can absorb and deliver unlimited violence, whose confidence never wavers, whose emotional lives are subordinated to their operational effectiveness. This is a comforting model of masculinity, one that reassures the audience that strength, certainty, and control are sufficient for navigating a dangerous world. Baby’s Ajay Singh Rajput offers a different model: the professional whose heroism consists not of spectacular physical feats but of quiet competence, institutional loyalty, and the willingness to do unglamorous work without recognition. Akshay Kumar’s restrained performance in Baby is arguably more radical than his action heroics in other films, because it redefines heroism as professionalism rather than spectacle.
Dhurandhar pushes this interrogation further than any other Bollywood spy film by presenting a protagonist whose masculinity is systematically dismantled by his mission. Hamza Ali Mazari must perform a version of masculine identity, the Lyari gangster, the loyal Pakistani, the man embedded in networks of criminal and political power, that is fundamentally foreign to who Jaskirat Singh Rangi actually is. The performance of this foreign masculinity is so sustained and so total that it eventually overwrites the original. Singh’s portrayal captures the specific horror of this overwriting: the moments when Hamza’s reflexes, trained for survival in Karachi, override Jaskirat’s instincts, trained for a life in Pathankot that no longer exists. This is not the story of a hero who triumphs through strength; it is the story of a man whose strength becomes indistinguishable from his self-destruction. The character analysis of Hamza Ali Mazari explores this dimension in detail, but its significance for this ranking is that Dhurandhar’s treatment of its protagonist’s masculinity elevates the film beyond genre entertainment into genuine psychological drama.
Raazi’s Sehmat represents the most radical departure of all: a spy protagonist whose heroism is defined entirely through emotional intelligence, relational manipulation, and the willingness to sacrifice personal happiness for an abstract national cause. Sehmat does not fight. She does not run. She does not deploy gadgets or weapons. She listens, remembers, observes, and transmits, and the emotional toll of this quiet espionage is more devastating than any action sequence in the genre’s history. Meghna Gulzar’s film argues, implicitly but powerfully, that the most dangerous form of intelligence work is not the kind that puts the body at risk but the kind that puts the soul at risk. Sehmat’s heroism is invisible, unrecognized, and ultimately self-annihilating, and the film’s refusal to celebrate this sacrifice is what makes it the genre’s most morally serious achievement alongside Dhurandhar.
The Box Office Economics of Spy Cinema
The commercial trajectory of Bollywood spy cinema reveals patterns that illuminate both the genre’s creative evolution and the industry’s business dynamics. The genre’s economic story can be divided into three eras, each defined by a different relationship between spy content and commercial performance.
The first era, stretching roughly from Ek Tha Tiger’s release through War, established that spy thrillers could reliably generate 200-400 crore domestic collections when powered by established stars and franchise recognition. This era’s economics were fundamentally star-driven: Tiger earned because of Salman Khan, Pathaan earned because of Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback, and War earned because of the Hrithik-Tiger Shroff pairing. The spy genre provided the framework, but star power provided the commercial engine. The implication for the industry was clear: spy films were a safe genre for deploying expensive talent, because the genre’s action spectacle and patriotic resonance aligned naturally with the audience demographics that drive opening weekends.
The second era began with Dhurandhar’s release and continues through the present. Dhurandhar’s collection trajectory, Rs 28.60 crore on opening Friday building to Rs 840+ crore net domestic, demonstrated a commercial pattern unprecedented in Bollywood: a spy film whose legs (total collection divided by first-week collection) exceeded those of every previous Hindi-language release. This pattern indicated that Dhurandhar was not merely attracting the usual opening-weekend audience but continuously pulling new viewers through word-of-mouth advocacy. The commercial implication was revolutionary: a spy film driven by content quality rather than star power alone could outperform star-driven vehicles over a full theatrical run. Dhurandhar 2’s even more explosive trajectory, crossing Rs 443 crore in its extended opening weekend alone, confirmed that the franchise had achieved the rarest commercial status: a property where audience demand outstripped supply of screens and showtimes.
The third era, still emerging, is defined by the streaming economics that now supplement theatrical performance. Dhurandhar’s Netflix deal, reportedly valued at Rs 85 crore, represents a significant portion of the film’s total revenue that would not have existed a decade ago. The streaming premium for spy content, driven by these platforms’ need for marquee action properties to attract and retain subscribers, has made the genre even more financially attractive for producers. A spy film that collects 300 crore theatrically and sells streaming rights for 80 crore represents a different economic proposition than a spy film that depends entirely on theatrical revenue, and this dual-revenue model encourages producers to invest in the production values and creative ambition that distinguish the genre’s best entries. To browse the full box office data with interactive charts, the economic transformation becomes even clearer when examined at the granular level of day-wise collections and territory-wise performance.
The economic data also reveals the genre’s geographic evolution. Dhurandhar’s collection pattern showed exceptional performance in traditionally underperforming markets: the film’s South Indian collections significantly exceeded typical Hindi-film performance in those territories, and its overseas performance, particularly in North America, established new benchmarks for Hindi spy cinema. This geographic broadening suggests that the spy genre’s appeal is expanding beyond the Hindi heartland into pan-Indian and global-Indian markets, a trend that the all-time box office records analysis places in the context of Bollywood’s broader commercial evolution.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: What is the best Bollywood spy thriller movie of all time?
Dhurandhar holds the top position in this ranking because it combines psychological depth, procedural authenticity, and cinematic ambition at a level no other Bollywood spy film has matched. The film’s commitment to exploring the psychological cost of deep-cover espionage, rather than merely using espionage as a backdrop for action sequences, sets it apart from every other entry in the genre. Ranveer Singh’s performance as Hamza Ali Mazari, an undercover operative who gradually loses himself in his cover identity, achieves a level of dramatic complexity that transcends genre filmmaking entirely.
Q: How does Dhurandhar compare to Pathaan as a spy thriller?
Dhurandhar and Pathaan represent fundamentally different approaches to the same genre. Pathaan treats espionage as spectacle, delivering polished action sequences, globe-trotting adventure, and the charismatic star power of Shah Rukh Khan within a commercially optimized franchise structure. Dhurandhar treats espionage as a psychological condition, exploring what a decade of undercover work does to a human being’s identity, relationships, and moral compass. Both approaches are valid, but Dhurandhar achieves a depth and emotional weight that Pathaan does not attempt. Commercially, Dhurandhar’s franchise surpassed Pathaan’s collection records by a substantial margin.
Q: Is Raazi the best female-led spy film in Bollywood?
Raazi is not merely the best female-led spy film in Bollywood; it is the only one that fully commits to centering the female experience of espionage. Alia Bhatt’s Sehmat is not a female version of a male spy; she is a woman whose intelligence work exploits and destroys the domestic sphere, the very space that traditional Bollywood cinema celebrates as feminine. The film’s power comes from showing that espionage requires the betrayal of intimacy, and that this betrayal is gendered in ways that male-centered spy films rarely acknowledge. Alpha, the upcoming Alia Bhatt vehicle in the YRF Spy Universe, will attempt something different: a female action spy in the Pathaan mold.
Q: What are the YRF Spy Universe movies in order?
The YRF Spy Universe consists of Ek Tha Tiger (2012), Tiger Zinda Hai (2017), War (2019), Pathaan (2023), Tiger 3 (2023), and the upcoming Alpha (2026). The films share a narrative universe centered on India’s intelligence agencies, with interconnected characters and crossover appearances. The franchise’s chronological viewing order differs from its release order, and the full guide to the Spy Universe provides the complete timeline, analysis, and future projections.
Q: Which Bollywood spy movies are based on true stories?
Several Bollywood spy films draw inspiration from real intelligence operations. Raazi is based on the true story of a Kashmiri woman who married into a Pakistani military family to pass intelligence to India during the 1971 war. Dhurandhar draws loose inspiration from multiple real events including the IC-814 hijacking, the 2001 Parliament attack, the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and developments related to Pakistan’s Lyari operations. Baby is inspired by multiple counter-terrorism operations. Bellbottom dramatizes a real hijacking rescue. Madras Cafe is based on the events surrounding the LTTE and the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. The detailed analysis of every Bollywood spy film based on true stories provides the full investigation of what was real, what was changed, and why.
Q: Is Baby or Dhurandhar a better spy thriller?
Baby is a more disciplined procedural exercise; it does one thing, counter-terrorism operations, with mechanical precision and no wasted motion. Dhurandhar is a more ambitious psychological exploration that attempts to show what years of undercover work do to a person’s identity and moral compass. Baby is tighter; Dhurandhar is deeper. Both rank in the top four on this list, and the preference between them depends on whether the viewer values procedural efficiency or psychological depth more highly.
Q: Why did Tiger 3 underperform compared to other YRF spy films?
Tiger 3’s underperformance relative to franchise expectations reflects the risks of formula fatigue. The film repeated the structural template of its predecessors, a globe-trotting adventure with Salman Khan dispatching villains while protecting national security, without the situational novelty that distinguished Tiger Zinda Hai (the hostage rescue premise) or the star-power novelty that distinguished Pathaan (Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback). Audiences had seen Tiger perform this specific kind of heroism twice before, and without a fresh dramatic situation or a willingness to complicate the character, the third iteration offered diminishing returns. The lesson for franchise filmmaking is clear: audiences will return for characters they love, but only if those characters are placed in situations that feel genuinely new.
Q: What makes a good Bollywood spy movie different from a good Hollywood spy movie?
The fundamental difference is what espionage represents in each culture’s storytelling. Hollywood spy films tend to center individual identity crises (who am I?) and institutional betrayal (can I trust my own agency?). Bollywood spy films tend to center collective sacrifice (what does the nation ask of its agents?) and border anxiety (what happens at the line between us and them?). The best Bollywood spy films, like Dhurandhar and Raazi, explore distinctly Indian geopolitical tensions, the RAW-ISI rivalry, the weight of Partition, the specific pain of cross-border terrorism, that Hollywood cannot replicate because they emerge from a different historical experience.
Q: Which Bollywood spy film has the best action sequences?
Dhurandhar and its sequel contain the most dramatically integrated action sequences in Bollywood spy cinema, where every physical confrontation advances the narrative and reveals character. War delivers the most spectacularly choreographed action, particularly the Hrithik Roshan-Tiger Shroff confrontations. Baby provides the most procedurally realistic action, with operations staged like actual intelligence operations rather than action-movie set pieces. The answer depends on whether the viewer defines “best” as most thrilling, most realistic, or most narratively meaningful.
Q: Is the YRF Spy Universe better or worse than the Dhurandhar franchise?
The YRF Spy Universe and the Dhurandhar franchise represent different franchise philosophies. The YRF model prioritizes interconnection, star power, and commercial reliability across multiple entries. The Dhurandhar model prioritizes narrative depth, psychological complexity, and artistic ambition within a self-contained duology. The YRF model has produced more films and more aggregate revenue, but the Dhurandhar model has produced the two highest-ranked spy films on this list and the two highest individual collection records. The choice between them reflects a broader industry question: should Bollywood franchises prioritize breadth or depth?
Q: What are the upcoming Bollywood spy thrillers to look forward to?
Alpha, the first female-led entry in the YRF Spy Universe starring Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, represents the most anticipated upcoming spy thriller. Beyond Alpha, the streaming landscape continues to expand with series like The Family Man and Special Ops demonstrating that long-form spy narratives can find massive audiences. The success of Dhurandhar has reportedly encouraged multiple production houses to develop espionage properties, and Aditya Dhar’s next project is widely expected to continue exploring intelligence and military themes.
Q: How did Dhurandhar change the Bollywood spy thriller genre?
Dhurandhar changed the genre in three fundamental ways. First, it proved that an A-rated, three-and-a-half-hour spy thriller with no songs and limited comic relief could become the highest-grossing Hindi film ever, demolishing the industry assumption that spy cinema needed to be packaged as family entertainment. Second, it elevated the psychological standard, making the audience expect emotional depth and moral complexity rather than settling for star charisma and action spectacle. Third, it validated the standalone duology model as an alternative to the interconnected franchise approach, proving that a tightly contained two-film narrative could generate massive commercial returns without the overhead of universe-building.
Q: Which actor has delivered the best performance in a Bollywood spy film?
Alia Bhatt in Raazi and Ranveer Singh in Dhurandhar represent the pinnacle of spy film performance in Bollywood, and choosing between them depends on what the viewer values. Bhatt’s Sehmat is a masterclass in escalating emotional disintegration, a woman whose moral compass is systematically destroyed by the demands of her mission. Singh’s Hamza is a masterclass in identity fragmentation, a man playing a man playing another man, whose layers of performance become so intertwined that neither the character nor the audience can determine which identity is real. Both performances transcend the genre.
Q: What is the highest-grossing Bollywood spy film of all time?
Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge holds the record as the highest-grossing Bollywood spy film, with domestic net collections exceeding Rs 1,000 crore and worldwide gross exceeding Rs 1,435 crore. Dhurandhar Part 1 is the second-highest-grossing spy film with approximately Rs 1,307 crore worldwide. Pathaan ranks third with approximately Rs 1,055 crore worldwide. The interactive box office data explorer provides detailed day-wise collection data for all these films.
Q: Are Bollywood spy films just propaganda?
The propaganda question is legitimate but reductive. Some Bollywood spy films, particularly lower-quality entries, substitute jingoistic sentiment for dramatic complexity and function as uncritical celebrations of state action. But the best films in the genre, Raazi, Dhurandhar, Madras Cafe, Baby, engage with the moral costs of intelligence work, the ethical ambiguity of extrajudicial operations, and the human price of national security with a seriousness that propaganda cannot accommodate. Dhurandhar’s protagonist succeeds in his mission and is destroyed by his success; this is not the narrative arc of propaganda but the narrative arc of tragedy.
Q: How does Madras Cafe compare to other Bollywood spy films?
Madras Cafe occupies a unique position as the most critically serious Bollywood spy film, one that refuses the cathartic resolution that the genre typically provides. Its depiction of intelligence failure, institutional limitation, and the inability of individual competence to overcome systemic dysfunction distinguishes it from every other entry on this list. It is less commercially appealing than Dhurandhar or Pathaan, but its artistic integrity and its influence on subsequent spy filmmaking earn it a place in the top ten.
Q: What role did Baby play in shaping modern Bollywood spy cinema?
Baby established the procedural template that made Dhurandhar possible. Before Baby, Bollywood spy films treated intelligence work as a backdrop for star-driven action and romance. Baby treated intelligence work as the subject itself: the surveillance, the coordination, the split-second tactical decisions, the institutional politics. By proving that audiences would accept a spy film without songs, without romance, and without the comforting certainties of conventional heroism, Baby opened the door that Dhurandhar would later walk through.
Q: Is War or Tiger Zinda Hai the better YRF spy film?
War delivers superior action choreography, a more structurally innovative premise (the mentor-protege betrayal), and the benefit of Hrithik Roshan’s physical performance. Tiger Zinda Hai delivers a stronger situational premise (the hostage rescue), more effective ensemble dynamics, and a thematic dimension (the India-Pakistan nurse unity) that War’s plot mechanics do not attempt. Tiger Zinda Hai ranks higher in this list because its dramatic situation generates more sustained tension than War’s action set pieces, but both films represent the franchise at its best.
Q: How do streaming spy thrillers like The Family Man compare to Bollywood spy films?
Streaming spy thrillers like The Family Man benefit from the long-form format: multiple episodes and multiple seasons allow for character development, subplot exploration, and narrative complexity that a two-hour film cannot accommodate. Manoj Bajpayee’s Srikant Tiwari in The Family Man is arguably the most fully developed intelligence operative in Indian entertainment precisely because the series format gives him room to exist as a husband, a father, and a flawed professional simultaneously. However, the theatrical spy film retains advantages in visual spectacle, communal viewing experience, and concentrated dramatic impact that streaming cannot fully replicate.
Q: Which Bollywood spy film should someone watch first if they are new to the genre?
For a viewer new to Bollywood spy cinema, Pathaan provides the most accessible entry point: a polished, entertaining action thriller with star charisma, clear stakes, and production values that compete with Hollywood. After Pathaan, the viewer should watch Raazi to experience the genre’s emotional and psychological depth, then Baby for its procedural precision, and finally Dhurandhar and its sequel for the genre’s ultimate achievement. This viewing order traces the genre’s evolution from entertainment to art while ensuring that each subsequent film deepens the viewer’s appreciation of what Bollywood spy cinema can accomplish.
Q: How important is the Bollywood spy thriller genre to the overall Indian film industry?
The spy thriller has become the most commercially reliable genre in Bollywood, with Dhurandhar, Pathaan, and War among the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time. The genre’s dominance reflects a broader cultural shift: Indian audiences increasingly prefer narratives that engage with real-world geopolitical tensions over the romantic and family dramas that dominated previous decades. The commercial success of spy cinema has reshaped industry greenlighting priorities, talent development, and production investment in ways that will influence Bollywood for years to come.
Q: What are the best Bollywood spy movies on Netflix and streaming?
Dhurandhar Part 1 is available on Netflix (acquired for a reported Rs 85 crore in streaming rights). Raazi, Baby, Pathaan, and several other spy thrillers on this ranking are available across platforms including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+ Hotstar. The Family Man and Special Ops, both streaming-original spy series, are available on Disney+ Hotstar and Hotstar respectively. The streaming availability of Bollywood spy cinema has expanded its audience significantly beyond the theatrical window.
Q: Will Dhurandhar have a third part?
As of now, the Dhurandhar franchise has been presented as a duology, with both films completing the narrative arc of Hamza Ali Mazari’s undercover mission and its aftermath. Director Aditya Dhar has not officially confirmed a third installment, though the franchise’s historic commercial success makes future entries commercially logical. Whether a third film would serve the story, or whether the duology’s closed narrative is better left complete, is a question the filmmaker will need to answer. The post-credits scene of Part 2 may provide clues about the franchise’s future direction.
Q: How does the Bollywood spy genre compare to South Indian spy thrillers?
The South Indian film industries have produced notable spy and intelligence narratives (Sardar in Tamil, Goodachari in Telugu) but have not yet developed the spy thriller as a dominant commercial genre in the way Bollywood has. This may change as pan-India distribution expands and as Bollywood’s spy cinema success demonstrates the commercial viability of the genre across markets. The cultural specificity of South Indian spy cinema, with its different geopolitical frontiers and intelligence concerns, offers creative opportunities that Bollywood’s Pakistan-focused narratives do not explore.
Q: What are the most realistic Bollywood spy movies?
Baby, Madras Cafe, and Dhurandhar form the realism tier of Bollywood spy cinema. Baby achieves procedural realism through its meticulous staging of intelligence operations: the surveillance, the coordination between team members, the institutional hierarchy, and the constant awareness that operations can fail. Madras Cafe achieves geopolitical realism by refusing to simplify the Sri Lankan civil war into a conventional good-vs-evil framework, instead showing how intelligence agencies operate within conflicts they cannot control. Dhurandhar achieves psychological realism by committing to the decade-long timeline of deep-cover work, showing how sustained deception erodes identity in ways that procedural films cannot capture because they operate on compressed timescales. The YRF Spy Universe films, by contrast, prioritize entertainment realism, a world that looks plausible on screen but operates by the rules of spectacle rather than intelligence tradecraft, and this deliberate trade-off is what places them lower on the realism scale despite their higher production values.
Q: How did Alia Bhatt prepare for her role in Raazi?
Alia Bhatt’s preparation for Raazi reportedly involved extensive study of the source material, Harinder Sikka’s novel Calling Sehmat, which documents the real intelligence operation that inspired the film. Bhatt worked closely with director Meghna Gulzar to understand the psychological specifics of Sehmat’s predicament: a woman who must perform genuine intimacy with a man she has been sent to betray, while maintaining enough emotional distance to function as an intelligence asset. The physical preparation was less about combat training, since Sehmat does not fight, and more about behavioral calibration: learning the specific gestures, speech patterns, and domestic behaviors that would make a young Kashmiri woman’s integration into a Pakistani military household credible. Bhatt has spoken about how the role’s emotional demands affected her personally, describing the experience of inhabiting Sehmat’s moral disintegration across months of shooting as one of the most psychologically challenging experiences of her career.
Q: What is the Dhurandhar franchise about and why is it so popular?
The Dhurandhar franchise tells the story of Jaskirat Singh Rangi, a young Indian man recruited by intelligence agencies after personal tragedy and sent undercover as Hamza Ali Mazari into the criminal underworld of Karachi, Pakistan, where he spends a decade building a cover identity while gathering intelligence on cross-border terrorism networks. The franchise’s popularity stems from multiple converging factors: Ranveer Singh’s transformative lead performance, Aditya Dhar’s direction that combines visceral action with psychological depth, the film’s engagement with real Indian geopolitical anxieties (the Kashmir conflict, cross-border terrorism, intelligence operations), and production values that compete with Hollywood action cinema. The franchise’s commercial trajectory, from Rs 28.60 crore opening day to Rs 840+ crore net domestic for Part 1 and even higher for Part 2, reflects a convergence of content quality, star power, and cultural timing that the Indian film industry had never previously achieved at this scale.
Q: Which Bollywood spy films feature the best villains?
The Dhurandhar franchise features the most compelling antagonists in Bollywood spy cinema, with Sanjay Dutt’s Rehman Dakait establishing a menacing physical presence in Part 1 and the expanded villain gallery in Part 2 providing multiple layers of opposition. Rishi Kapoor’s Goldman in D-Day, a charming and paranoid Karachi crime lord modeled on Dawood Ibrahim, remains one of the genre’s most memorable villain performances. Akshaye Khanna’s Ajay Sanyal in Dhurandhar, while technically the protagonist’s handler rather than his antagonist, functions as the most morally ambiguous authority figure in the genre, a man whose intelligence brilliance is inseparable from his willingness to sacrifice human beings for institutional objectives. The YRF Spy Universe has struggled with villain quality; the franchise’s best antagonist is Hrithik Roshan’s Kabir in War, whose rogue-agent arc provides genuine dramatic complexity, while Emraan Hashmi’s villain in Tiger 3 represents the franchise’s nadir of antagonist characterization.
Q: How has the India-Pakistan conflict shaped Bollywood spy cinema?
The India-Pakistan conflict is the foundational narrative engine of Bollywood spy cinema. Virtually every major spy film on this ranking uses the India-Pakistan geopolitical rivalry as its dramatic backdrop, from Raazi’s 1971-era cross-border marriage espionage to Dhurandhar’s contemporary Karachi undercover operation to Pathaan’s ISI-linked antagonist to Baby’s counter-terrorism operations targeting Pakistan-linked networks. This narrative dominance reflects both the real geopolitical centrality of the India-Pakistan relationship to Indian national security and the dramatic richness that border tension provides: the proximity of the two cultures, the shared language and food and music, the specific pain of Partition, and the ongoing reality of cross-border terrorism create a landscape in which espionage operates not between strangers but between near-relatives, which deepens the genre’s emotional stakes immensely. The challenge for the genre going forward is to maintain this emotional depth while expanding its geographic and geopolitical scope beyond the Pakistan fixation.
Q: What makes Dhurandhar’s Karachi so convincing as a cinematic setting?
Dhurandhar’s Karachi, specifically its Lyari district, achieves a level of world-building unprecedented in Bollywood cinema. The production design creates a complete social ecosystem rather than a backdrop: the narrow streets with their specific signage and architecture, the food vendors and the chai stalls, the power dynamics between criminal lords, police, and military intelligence, the economic networks of drug trade and political patronage, and the community rhythms that govern daily life. The achievement is particularly remarkable because the sequences were shot in India and Thailand rather than Pakistan, requiring the production team to reconstruct Lyari from reference material, consultations with people familiar with the area, and creative design rather than location shooting. The result is a cinematic space that feels inhabited rather than constructed, where Hamza’s undercover existence carries the texture of daily life rather than the artificiality of a movie set. This world-building is what allows the audience to understand, at a sensory level, how a decade in this environment could transform a person’s identity.
Q: Are there any good Bollywood spy comedies?
The Bollywood spy comedy subgenre is thin but not nonexistent. Agent Vinod contains comedic elements woven into its thriller structure, reflecting Sriram Raghavan’s characteristic dark humor. The Don franchise, while primarily action-driven, deploys Shah Rukh Khan’s comic timing within its criminal-espionage framework. However, the spy genre’s dominant mode in Bollywood is dramatic rather than comic, and no Hindi-language spy comedy has achieved the commercial success or critical acclaim of the genre’s dramatic entries. This represents a potential creative opportunity: the comedy of intelligence work, the absurdity of bureaucratic espionage, the gap between operational competence and personal dysfunction, is well-explored in international entertainment (Spy, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Chuck) but largely untapped in Bollywood.
Q: How does the box office performance of spy thrillers compare to other Bollywood genres?
Spy thrillers have emerged as Bollywood’s most commercially reliable genre for producing blockbuster-level returns. The genre’s top performers, Dhurandhar, Dhurandhar 2, Pathaan, War, and Tiger Zinda Hai, all rank among the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time, with the Dhurandhar franchise holding the top two positions. This commercial dominance surpasses traditional Bollywood genres including romantic dramas, family entertainers, and comedies, all of which have produced individual hits but have not matched the spy genre’s consistent ability to generate 500+ crore collections. The spy genre’s commercial strength is attributed to its broad demographic appeal, combining action spectacle that attracts young male audiences with patriotic themes that resonate across age groups, star-driven casting that ensures opening-weekend demand, and franchise structures that build cumulative audience loyalty.