There is a particular kind of silence that speaks louder than any tweet. When a film becomes the highest-grossing Hindi release in history, when it crosses one thousand crore rupees and then fifteen hundred crore rupees and shows no signs of stopping, when it generates more online conversation than any Bollywood film in a decade, the public would reasonably expect the industry that produced it to celebrate. That is not exactly what happened with Dhurandhar and its sequel Dhurandhar: The Revenge. What happened instead was something far more interesting, far more revealing, and far more instructive about the state of Indian cinema and the politics that run beneath its surface.
This article is not primarily a review of either film. Both parts of the Dhurandhar duology have been covered in detail across the InsightCrunch archive, from the complete analysis of Dhurandhar Part 1 to the full breakdown of both endings to the comprehensive franchise guide that maps the entire creative architecture of what Aditya Dhar built. This article is about something different. This is the record of how India responded to those films. Every major voice. Every significant reaction. Every thunderous endorsement, every careful qualification, every pointed silence, and every moment when a tweet, a post, or a conspicuous absence said something that studio press releases and critical reviews never quite captured.
What the social media record of Dhurandhar and its sequel reveals is a portrait of Indian cinema in transition, a moment when the established power hierarchies of the Hindi film industry were challenged not by a rival commercial formula but by a film that simply refused to play by the rules everyone had agreed upon, and that found its loudest champions not in the industry where it was made but in the industries it had always been implicitly ranked below.
Part One: The Context Before the Conversation
To understand why the reactions to Dhurandhar mattered so much, you need to understand what Indian cinema’s social media ecosystem looked like before the film arrived. The pattern was established and predictable. A major Bollywood release would generate a wave of celebrity congratulatory posts on the day of release, almost always timed to the film’s opening, almost always using language so generic as to be interchangeable between any two films. Top stars would tweet about the scale and the emotion and the proud-to-be-Indian feelings with a reliability that had made such posts almost invisible to audiences. They were background noise, promotional furniture, the digital equivalent of a handshake at a premiere. Nobody read them for information. Nobody took them as a genuine response to the art. They were social obligation converted into legible text.
The pattern extended in a more complicated direction when it came to stars from other industries. The relationship between Bollywood and the South Indian film industries, particularly Telugu cinema, had long been characterized by a qualified mutual respect that functioned more like competition than collaboration. Bollywood’s historic dominance of the national conversation had been challenged aggressively by the pan-India successes of RRR, the KGF films, Pushpa, and Bahubali. Those films had not merely performed well. They had exposed a gap in ambition, in scale, and in the willingness to make films that treated their audiences as participants in a spectacle rather than passive consumers of a polished product. When Telugu filmmakers succeeded at this level, Bollywood’s response was rarely generous. The acknowledgment was measured, the appreciation was qualified, and the underlying anxiety was visible.
Dhurandhar arrived into this environment as a Bollywood production, technically, produced by Jio Studios under Aditya Dhar’s B62 Studios banner, featuring a cast drawn primarily from Hindi cinema. But in its ambitions, its methods, and its relationship to the audience, it drew more from the pan-India playbook that had been pioneered by directors like SS Rajamouli than from the conventions of mainstream Bollywood releases. It was a film that was uncompromisingly long, that treated its audience as intelligent adults, that refused the shortcuts of star-driven spectacle in favor of genuinely earned emotion, and that operated at a scale of moral and narrative complexity that Bollywood had not regularly attempted in the espionage genre. The complete guide to the franchise documents how Dhar constructed this world from the ground up, with a specificity of detail and a seriousness of purpose that set it apart from everything around it.
When it worked, as it clearly did given the box office numbers, it created a situation that the Indian film industry’s social media conventions were entirely unprepared for. How do you perform congratulations to a film that challenges the very category it belongs to? How do you signal support for a colleague whose success implicitly raises questions about why similar ambition was so rarely deployed elsewhere? And how do you navigate the political dimensions of a film whose narrative choices, whose loose inspirations in real events, whose treatment of India-Pakistan geopolitics, make it a target for criticism from exactly the voices that Bollywood’s most prominent stars had spent years being careful not to antagonize?
The answers to those questions are written in the pattern of who spoke, who stayed silent, and what the silence meant. They are also written in the extraordinary and deeply genuine outpouring of support from voices that had no institutional reason to perform praise, voices from industries far removed from the networks of professional obligation that govern Bollywood’s internal congratulation culture.
Part Two: The First Film Breaks
Dhurandhar opened on December 5, 2025. The advance booking numbers had already told a story. Multiple sold-out shows at major multiplex chains in cities across India, strong early numbers from the United States, Canada, and Australia, and a social media buzz that had been building since the release of the trailer in November 2025.
The trailer reaction had itself been a signal. When Ranveer Singh’s fierce, transformed avatar in long hair and a beard appeared on screens for the first time, the response was immediate and visceral. The internet did not produce the measured appreciation of a quality product. It produced genuine shock, genuine excitement, and the kind of organic enthusiasm that no promotional campaign can manufacture. The trailer crossed tens of millions of views within hours. The clips of Akshaye Khanna were shared and reshared as standalone moments. The glimpse of the Lyari world Dhar had constructed, its visual texture, its moral weight, its refusal to make the criminal ecosystem look glamorous in the conventional Bollywood way, generated conversation about what kind of film this was going to be.
When the film released and audiences began emerging from theatres, the reaction crystallized quickly into something that the trade had not seen in years. The word-of-mouth was not just positive. It was urgent. People were calling friends during shows and saying come now. They were posting reactions in the aisles. They were returning the next day. The film’s unusual opening day pattern, a modest start that exploded exponentially through the weekend and then continued to grow week after week rather than declining, told the story of organic audience discovery that trade analysts had been describing as a relic of an older era of Hindi cinema.
The film ultimately crossed one thousand crore rupees at the worldwide box office on December 26, 2025, and went on to finish with a global gross of approximately 1,350 crore rupees, making it the highest-grossing Indian film of 2025 and the third highest-grossing Hindi film of all time behind Pathaan and Jawan. The detailed box office analysis of Dhurandhar Part 1 breaks down every territory and every phase of its theatrical run.
But the numbers are context. The real story is the conversation that happened around the film, the voices that spoke first, loudest, and with most apparent sincerity.
Part Three: Hrithik Roshan and the Response That Started Everything
The first major celebrity reaction to Dhurandhar that generated genuine discussion across the industry came from Hrithik Roshan. It was significant both for what it said and, in retrospect, for what it hinted at about the more complicated reactions that would follow its sequel.
Roshan posted a detailed review on his social media following his viewing of the first installment. His response was warm and specific, praising individual performances with a particularity that distinguished it immediately from the generic congratulatory posts that typically populate Bollywood’s social media after a major release. He specifically called out Akshaye Khanna, writing that the actor had always been his favorite and that Dhurandhar was proof of why. He praised Ranveer Singh’s journey through the film, noting the range from silent to fierce and calling it consistent work. He expressed particular appreciation for R. Madhavan, using the phrase “bloody mad grace, strength and dignity.”
The response was received warmly across social media. People noted that Roshan had taken the time to be specific, to mention individual performers and individual qualities, in a way that suggested he had actually watched the film and engaged with it rather than offering an obligatory nod. His enthusiasm for part two, expressed at the end of the post, was read as genuine anticipation rather than promotional support.
But Roshan’s relationship with the Dhurandhar franchise would become more complicated when the sequel arrived. His initial reaction to the first installment was the relatively uncomplicated act of a senior Bollywood star recognizing craft and performance in a colleague’s film. What came later would demonstrate that Dhurandhar had become something more contentious than a simple artistic success.
Part Four: Allu Arjun and the South’s First Major Statement
The reaction from South India to Dhurandhar Part 1 was not organized or coordinated. It happened organically, as individual actors and filmmakers watched the film and responded to what they saw. But its cumulative effect was to establish a pattern that would become the defining social narrative around the franchise: that the film’s most vocal and most genuinely enthusiastic champions came from outside the industry that made it.
Allu Arjun was among the first major Telugu stars to publicly respond. His review of Dhurandhar Part 1 was delivered in his characteristic style: energetic, emphatic, and generous in its specific acknowledgments of individual contributors to the film.
The review was notable for several reasons. Allu Arjun did not merely praise the film in the abstract. He named Aditya Dhar specifically as an ace filmmaker with swag, a phrase that resonated widely because it communicated genuine respect for directorial craft rather than professional obligation. He praised Ranveer Singh’s magnetic presence and noted his versatility, which was significant coming from a performer who had himself built a career on the specific combination of physical transformation and emotional range that Dhurandhar required. He acknowledged the supporting cast, naming Akshaye Khanna and Arjun Rampal specifically. And he ended with an enthusiasm that the post’s tone made feel authentic rather than performative.
The response to Allu Arjun’s review was itself significant. Social media tracked the fact that a major Telugu star had enthusiastically reviewed a Hindi film on the same day that several senior Bollywood figures had remained conspicuously quiet. The contrast was noticed. It was noted, discussed, and it began generating the first wave of public commentary about the industry dynamics that the film was exposing.
What did it mean that Allu Arjun, fresh off the extraordinary success of Pushpa: The Rise and all that it had done for Telugu cinema’s national profile, had gone out of his way to review a Bollywood film in such warm terms? Several interpretations circulated. The most generous, and in retrospect perhaps the most accurate, was simply that he had watched a film of genuine quality and felt compelled to say so. The fact that the same compulsion seemed not to strike certain Bollywood contemporaries of the film’s director and star was, in that reading, a commentary on those absences rather than on the presence of southern voices.
Part Five: Aditya Dhar’s Reaction to Allu Arjun
The chain of responses that Allu Arjun’s tweet set off was itself revealing. Aditya Dhar, who had by this point emerged as one of the most thoughtful and communicative directors in Indian cinema’s social media presence, responded to Arjun’s review with a warmth that matched the sincerity of the original post.
Dhar’s response expressed genuine gratitude and specifically acknowledged the significance of appreciation coming from someone of Allu Arjun’s stature. The exchange established a template for how the director would handle the wave of support that was about to come from South Indian voices: with genuine emotion, specific acknowledgment, and a refusal to treat the praise as mere promotional content.
The relationship between Dhar and the Telugu film industry that this exchange began would continue through the sequel’s release and beyond, becoming one of the more genuinely heartwarming aspects of a franchise that generated significant controversy alongside its success.
Part Six: The Trailer for The Revenge and the Building Momentum
Between the close of Dhurandhar Part 1’s theatrical run and the March 2026 release of Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the social media conversation around the franchise evolved and deepened. The re-release of Part 1 in March 2026, timed to coincide with the sequel’s theatrical window, brought fresh audiences to the first film and generated a second wave of reactions from people who had waited or missed the original run.
The trailer for Dhurandhar: The Revenge, released in the first week of March 2026, was received with an excitement that exceeded the response to the first film’s promotional material. The first trailer had been introducing audiences to a world they did not know. The second trailer was reintroducing them to a world they had already fallen in love with, showing them what Ranveer Singh as Jaskirat Singh Rangi looked like in full operational mode, confirming that the emotional stakes from the first installment would be honored and elevated, and doing so with a visual confidence that signaled this was a filmmaker who knew exactly what he had built and how to pay it off.
The advance booking numbers for the sequel were extraordinary by any measure. Pre-sales crossed 125 crore rupees in India alone before release day, surpassing records that had been considered essentially unreachable for non-holiday Bollywood releases. In North America, advance sales surpassed the one million dollar mark before a single show had screened. By the time the film’s Wednesday previews began on March 18, 2026, it was clear that this was going to be one of the largest openings in Indian cinema history.
Industry trackers began circulating the milestone numbers with the kind of frequency usually reserved for elections or cricket tournaments. The social media temperature was rising in a way that felt qualitatively different from typical pre-release hype. This was not manufactured buzz. It was the amplification of genuine audience desire to continue a story that the first film had established as worth investing in emotionally and intellectually.
Part Seven: Release Day and the South Indian Avalanche
March 19, 2026. Dhurandhar: The Revenge opens in cinemas across India and internationally in five languages: Hindi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam. The Day 1 collection of approximately 96.78 crore rupees net in India makes it the first Bollywood film to earn 100 crore rupees on its opening day. The global opening figure of 236.63 crore rupees is the fourth-highest opening day for any Indian film ever.
The critical and audience reactions begin arriving before most of the industry has even woken up. Special screening attendees from the March 18 paid previews have already been posting reactions through the night. By the morning of March 19, the social media landscape is dense with responses ranging from emotional testimonials to detailed analytical breakdowns.
And then the South Indian superstars start speaking.
The first major Telugu voice to respond to The Revenge on release day itself was Vijay Deverakonda, whose tweet described the film in terms that set the emotional register for the wave of responses that would follow: intensely patriotic, specifically appreciative of the craft, and personally invested in a way that went beyond professional courtesy.
Then came Allu Arjun, this time for the sequel. His second review of the franchise matched the energy and specificity of his first, describing The Revenge as patriotism with swag and celebrating what he called an Indian story with international swag. He declared Ranveer Singh to be on fire. He said Aditya Dhar had dominated. He ended with Jai Hind.
Within hours of Allu Arjun’s post, Jr. Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao, known universally as Jr NTR, one of the biggest stars in Telugu cinema and the co-lead of SS Rajamouli’s globally celebrated RRR, posted what would become one of the most widely quoted celebrity reactions to either Dhurandhar film.
The response to Jr NTR’s tweet was immediate and substantial. It was appreciated not just for its enthusiastic praise but for its specificity. Jr NTR had clearly watched the film and had been moved by it, and his review reflected engagement with the film’s actual content rather than its commercial profile. He referenced specific performers, specific qualities, and the specific emotional experience of watching the film unfold. He noted that it was a film that rouses your emotions and stays with you long after the end titles roll.
Aditya Dhar’s response to Jr NTR was as warm as his response to Allu Arjun had been to the first film’s review. He told Jr NTR that it was one industry, one heartbeat, and that every storm they ride together. The exchange felt genuinely moving to the many people who encountered it, in part because it was happening publicly and visibly at a moment when the film’s own industry of origin was largely maintaining a pointed silence.
Part Eight: Mahesh Babu’s Explosion
If Jr NTR’s review was detailed and emotionally specific, Mahesh Babu’s response to The Revenge was percussion. The Telugu superstar did not use careful language or measured praise. He described the film as an explosion executed with perfect precision, which was simultaneously a description of the film’s action sequences, its narrative structure, and its commercial impact.
Mahesh Babu’s praise was significant beyond its intensity. He was a figure whose opinion on films of ambition carried particular weight because of his own career, defined by an insistence on quality over commercial convenience that had sometimes cost him box office numbers. When someone of that sensibility described The Revenge as the finest version of Ranveer unleashed, the phrase landed with specific authority. It was not merely a star saying another star was good. It was a judgment from someone who understood what disciplined performance looked like and who was explicitly naming what he saw in Singh’s work as exceptional.
The standing ovation that Mahesh Babu said the film deserved from audiences became, in the days following his post, a kind of shorthand for what the film had accomplished. You would see it referenced in dozens of other posts, by fans and industry observers alike, as shorthand for the caliber of validation the film had received from the Telugu industry’s most respected voices.
Part Nine: Ram Charan’s Detailed Assessment
Ram Charan came to The Revenge with a different perspective than many of the other Telugu stars who responded, not because he was less enthusiastic but because he is a performer of unusual analytical precision who tends to engage with films at the level of craft rather than experience. His review of Dhurandhar: The Revenge reflected this quality.
Charan did not lead with superlatives. He started with a description of the film’s effect: raw, gripping, impactful. Three adjectives that each do specific work. Raw signals that the film does not sanitize its content or soften its edges for easier consumption. Gripping signals narrative construction, the mechanics of engagement that keep an audience present and invested through nearly four hours of material. Impactful signals the lasting quality of the experience, the fact that it stays with you and matters after you leave the theatre.
He then moved through the film’s components with a methodical appreciation that read like the assessment of someone who had been thinking about what he watched rather than simply reacting to it. He praised Ranveer Singh for intensity that holds your attention throughout. He acknowledged Sanjay Dutt, R. Madhavan, and Arjun Rampal for standing strong with solid performances, a phrase that is more specific than it might appear: solid supporting performances in a film of this scale and density are genuinely difficult to deliver, because they require actors to hold their own against both the film’s visual spectacular and the central performance’s dominance.
His praise for Shashwat Sachdev’s music as elevating the film was consistent with how many others who responded to the film specifically acknowledged the score, which the soundtrack and background score analysis on InsightCrunch covers in detail. And his conclusion, praising Jio Studios and producer Jyoti Deshpande for backing a vision and delivering one of the most riveting films in Indian cinema, was significant because it acknowledged the institutional courage required to greenlight and produce a film of this ambition rather than the safer, more conventional commercial alternatives that were always available.
Part Ten: SS Rajamouli and the Response That Transcended Industry
The response from SS Rajamouli to Dhurandhar: The Revenge was of a different order than anything that had come before it, not because Rajamouli’s admiration was greater than that of the other Telugu voices who had spoken, but because of what Rajamouli represents in the global conversation about Indian cinema.
SS Rajamouli is not simply a successful Indian director. He is the filmmaker who, through the Bahubali franchise and through RRR, demonstrated to the world that Indian cinema was capable of spectacle, emotional complexity, and narrative architecture that operated at a genuinely global level of ambition. His endorsement of any film carries the weight of someone who has himself redefined what is possible and who therefore has an unusually calibrated sense of where quality in Indian cinema actually lives.
His review of The Revenge covered both installments and made a specific comparative judgment: that the sequel had surpassed the original in both scale and soul.
The detail and specificity of Rajamouli’s response elevated it far above the level of a congratulatory post. He identified the writing as the source of the film’s genuine tension, noting that the plot twists create genuine tension charged with emotion rather than merely mechanical surprise. He singled out a specific scene, the sequence with the sister in the shed, as a masterclass in acting from Ranveer Singh. He praised R. Madhavan explicitly, using the phrase “you carried the helplessness and frustration of a nation so well that we felt your success as ours,” which was perhaps the most emotionally precise description of a supporting performance in the entire corpus of celebrity reactions to the film.
And he praised Aditya Dhar’s courage explicitly: it takes guts to make and release a film four hours long. This was not simply an observation about runtime. It was a filmmaker who had himself made films of extraordinary length acknowledging the institutional and commercial bravery required to insist on a story’s full dimensions rather than compressing it into a more commercially conventional shape. The audience is glued to the seat till the last frame, he noted, and this too was specific: not merely that the film is watchable, but that it maintains engagement until its final moment, which is one of the hardest achievements in long-form narrative cinema.
Aditya Dhar’s response to Rajamouli was characteristically emotional and specific. He did not simply say thank you. He articulated what this particular response meant to him, from a filmmaker whose work he had grown up watching as a benchmark for what Indian cinema could achieve. The exchange became one of the most widely shared across the franchise’s entire social media life, representing a passing of the torch, of sorts, from one generation of Indian cinema’s most ambitious storytellers to the next.
Part Eleven: Rajinikanth and the Moment That Stopped Kollywood
Every wave has a peak. The wave of South Indian celebrity responses to Dhurandhar: The Revenge reached its peak on March 23, 2026, when Rajinikanth posted on his X account.
Rajinikanth does not post frequently. He does not review films regularly. He does not use social media as a promotional vehicle in the way that many of his contemporaries do. When he posts, it means something. When he posts about a film from another industry, the significance multiplies dramatically. Kollywood was not prepared for what he wrote.
The directness of the praise was startling coming from a figure who is known for measured public statements. Box office ka baap. A must watch film for every Indian. Jai Hind. Three declarations, each carrying a different register of praise. The first is commercial recognition, acknowledging the film’s dominance of the theatrical landscape. The second is cultural recommendation, telling every Indian that this film belongs to them and they should see it. The third is patriotic affirmation, endorsing not just the film but the impulse behind it.
Aditya Dhar’s response to Rajinikanth’s post was the most emotionally raw public statement the director had made throughout the entire campaign. He wrote about having grown up measuring entertainment with one benchmark, which was Rajinikanth himself. He wrote about the swag and grace that the superstar had brought to Indian cinema for decades. He called receiving a must watch endorsement from the man who had defined his own understanding of what cinema could do the biggest superstar moment of his life. He ended with Jai Hind.
The exchange was covered by every major entertainment publication in India. It was shared hundreds of thousands of times. And it was understood by everyone who encountered it, regardless of which industry they followed, as a genuine moment of artistic recognition across the borders that Indian cinema’s various industries typically maintained around themselves.
Part Twelve: Nagarjuna and the Filmmaking Inspiration
Nagarjuna’s response to The Revenge took the conversation from commercial and emotional registers into a more specifically cinematic one. The veteran Telugu star described the film as blowing his mind and as one of those films that inspires and changes filmmaking. This last phrase was significant. It was not a casual compliment. It was a statement from someone with decades of experience as both an actor and a producer that this film had shifted his own sense of what was possible.
The response to Nagarjuna’s review was particularly warm among filmmakers and aspiring directors who circulated the quote widely. It validated something that audiences had been feeling but that few industry insiders had explicitly said: that Dhurandhar was not merely a successful film but a film that changed the conversation about what Indian cinema could be.
Ram Gopal Varma’s reaction to The Revenge, which he described at length across multiple posts, took this logic to its most provocative conclusion. Varma wrote that the film is a horror for every filmmaker who still worships the godly hero. He called it a reset button for Indian cinema. He was characteristically blunt about what the film’s success meant: that a certain type of filmmaker, a certain type of star, and a certain type of production strategy had been shown to be inferior to what Dhar and his team had accomplished. The provocation was deliberate. Varma rarely says things he does not mean, and the specific target of his commentary, the godly hero template of South Indian mass cinema and its Bollywood equivalent, was clear.
Part Thirteen: The Bollywood Silence and What It Meant
And then there were the names that did not appear.
Amitabh Bachchan, who has 45 million followers on X and who posts multiple times daily about subjects ranging from his health to Kaun Banega Crorepati promotions to philosophical observations about the nature of existence, did not post about Dhurandhar or Dhurandhar: The Revenge.
Shah Rukh Khan, whose social media presence is arguably the most followed and most analyzed of any Indian film personality, did not post about either film.
Salman Khan did not post. Aamir Khan did not post. Ajay Devgn did not post. Ranbir Kapoor did not post. Shahid Kapoor did not post. Tiger Shroff did not post. Katrina Kaif did not post. Varun Dhawan did not post. Vidya Balan did not post. Anil Kapoor did not post. Rani Mukerji did not post.
And most pointedly, most discussed, most analyzed by anyone following the story: Deepika Padukone, Ranveer Singh’s wife and one of Hindi cinema’s biggest stars, did not publicly acknowledge what her husband had achieved.
The silence was so comprehensive, so systematic, and so conspicuous given the film’s commercial scale, that it became a story in its own right. Social media users noticed and began documenting it.
This viral tweet, which accumulated millions of impressions, articulated what many people were observing. The irony it described was stark: India’s greatest actor had praised the film while the superstar who should nominally have claimed it had not. The industry the film belonged to had largely declined to acknowledge it while the industries it had quietly outperformed were its most vocal champions. The embarrassment was not subtle. The post explicitly named it as such.
Another widely shared post simply listed the Bollywood names that had not responded with the single word silent after each name. The post ran long. The list was long. And its length was itself the argument.
Part Fourteen: Prakash Raj and the Dissenter’s Voice
Not everyone who responded from outside Bollywood was offering praise.
Prakash Raj, a veteran actor respected across multiple South Indian industries whose political forthrightness has made him one of the more distinctive voices on Indian social media, posted a series of cryptic and pointed comments about The Revenge and about the broader wave of South Indian praise the film was receiving.
The suggestion that the praise from South Indian stars might represent something other than genuine artistic admiration, that it might reflect obligations or alignments that Raj was not prepared to name explicitly, sparked immediate and heated pushback. Those who loved the film took it as an attack on both the film and the integrity of the Telugu stars who had praised it. Those who shared Raj’s general political sympathies saw it as a legitimate question about the relationship between celebrity endorsement and ideological positioning.
Raj amplified his position with a second post, sharing a clip from the 1961 film Hum Dono featuring the song Abhi Na Jaao Chhod Kar and captioning it with the note that he was very far from Dhurandhar, followed by his characteristic just asking. The combination of humor and pointed refusal to engage with the film on its own terms was read by supporters as principled resistance and by critics as performative contrarianism from a figure who had built a public persona around political dissent and who perhaps had difficulty distinguishing between films that warranted critique and films that simply reflected values different from his own.
The debate around Prakash Raj’s response to The Revenge was, in many ways, the most substantive public conversation the franchise generated, because it forced engagement with a question that the straightforward celebratory responses had bypassed: Was Dhurandhar a piece of art, a piece of entertainment, or a piece of political messaging, and could it be all three simultaneously? The answer the film’s audience gave, at the box office and in the social media conversation that surrounded it, was clearly yes. Whether that answer was satisfactory to everyone was equally clearly no.
Part Fifteen: Dhruv Rathee and the Propaganda Argument
The most widely discussed critical response to Dhurandhar: The Revenge from outside the traditional film criticism establishment came from Dhruv Rathee, the YouTuber and political commentator whose channel generates substantial influence among urban, educated, and politically progressive Indian audiences.
Rathee’s assessment of the film was sharp and specific in a way that distinguished it from reflexive political criticism. He did not deny that the film was technically accomplished. He did not dismiss the performances or the direction or the production values. What he argued was that the film’s political content, its treatment of the India-Pakistan relationship, its characterization of Pakistani institutions, and its implicit framing of the intelligence operations at its center as uncomplicated moral goods, represented propaganda, and poorly executed propaganda at that.
The provocative element of his critique was not the propaganda charge, which had been made by others, but the suffix: not even well-made propaganda. This was a different argument from the one being made by people who were troubled by the film’s politics but awed by its filmmaking. Rathee was arguing that the film’s propagandistic elements were not incidental to its artistic quality but were actually in tension with it, that the moments of crude nationalist messaging undermined the genuine craft that was otherwise visible in the film.
The response to this critique was divided. Among those who agreed with his general political orientation, the argument was welcomed as a principled counter to what they saw as uncritical celebration of a film with troubling messaging. Among those who loved the film, the response ranged from substantive disagreement with his analysis to fury at what they saw as politically motivated dismissal of a work of genuine artistic merit.
The filmmaker himself addressed the propaganda criticism in several interviews, noting that the film drew inspiration from documented historical events and that portraying those events was not the same as fabricating a political narrative. Dhar’s consistent defense of the film’s historical grounding, and his willingness to engage with critics rather than dismiss them, added to his reputation as a filmmaker who took his work seriously enough to defend it on intellectual grounds.
Part Sixteen: Hrithik Roshan’s Complicated Second Act
When Dhurandhar: The Revenge released, Hrithik Roshan’s relationship with the franchise took a turn that made him simultaneously the most honest and most scrutinized Bollywood voice in the conversation.
Roshan had praised the first film with specificity and warmth. His reaction to the sequel was different. He praised the filmmaking. He praised the performances. And then he added a qualification that no other major voice in the conversation had included: he said he disagreed with the politics.
The response to this qualification was intense and divided. One faction praised Roshan for exactly the kind of nuanced honesty that the conversation needed, the ability to distinguish between artistic quality and political messaging, to acknowledge what a film does well while being transparent about disagreement with what it argues. This is, in principle, the most sophisticated kind of critical engagement, and in the context of a conversation that had been dominated by either uncritical enthusiasm or reflexive political dismissal, Roshan’s attempt at the middle ground was genuinely notable.
The other faction was harsher. Critics of Roshan’s position pointed out that he had not specified what politics he disagreed with, which made it impossible to evaluate his critique. They noted that a film about Indian intelligence operations against terrorism could be approached from various political angles and that vague disagreement covered a range of possible positions from the principled to the strategic. They also pointed out, with more personal edge, that his previous filmography was not without its own political dimensions and that his newly expressed discomfort with nationalist messaging in a colleague’s film sat uneasily alongside choices he had made in his own work.
The debate around Roshan’s comment lasted for days and generated significantly more heat than light, which is perhaps itself a reflection of the film’s success at touching genuinely contested territory rather than merely commercial nerve.
Part Seventeen: The Bollywood Voices That Did Speak
Amid the high-profile silence of Bollywood’s biggest names, a significant number of voices from the Hindi film industry did speak, and they spoke warmly. The picture of total Bollywood silence was never fully accurate, though the gap between those who spoke and those who stayed quiet was striking in its own way.
Preity Zinta attended a special screening of The Revenge and posted a glowing reaction that specifically praised Ranveer Singh’s acting. Her response was among the most quoted from the Bollywood side because of its specificity and because her reputation for saying what she actually thinks, rather than what might be strategically advisable, lent it credibility.
Kartik Aaryan’s response to the film was enthusiastic and fan-forward. He praised Ranveer Singh’s performance in terms that were direct and unambiguous, calling it beast-level work, and his engagement with the film felt genuine rather than obligatory.
Ananya Panday’s review specifically noted that the film was top-notch, and her enthusiasm was read as sincere by those who follow her social media closely, in part because she had not previously established a pattern of performative celebrity support for colleagues’ projects.
Alia Bhatt’s response was perhaps the most significant from the Bollywood camp, not because of what it said but because of what it represented. Bhatt posted on her Instagram story praising the film and specifically referencing the character of Jaskirat Singh Rangi and noting the magic of the director and the actor in complete sync. Given the personal connection between Bhatt and Singh, and given that she had been among those whose silence would have been noted and discussed, her decision to publicly celebrate the film was read as both a personal expression of pride and a conscious choice to not be part of the silence.
Karan Johar, who had not yet seen the film at the time of his early post-release response, acknowledged having a severe case of FOMO given the reactions he was seeing online. The honesty of this admission, that he was experiencing the social pressure of knowing everyone around him had seen something that was clearly extraordinary, was more interesting than a conventional review would have been.
Ayushmann Khurrana, Sidharth Malhotra, Vicky Kaushal, Anupam Kher, and Arjun Kapoor all posted positive reactions to the film, with Kher’s response being particularly effusive and specifically patriotic in the terms that his public persona typically employs.
Part Eighteen: Aditya Dhar’s Own Voice
Throughout the period between the first film’s release and the sequel’s box office dominance, Aditya Dhar himself became a compelling social media presence in a way that few Indian directors had managed.
Dhar’s communication style on social media is distinctive: personal without being self-indulgent, grateful without being obsequious, and engaged with the conversation around his work without becoming defensive about its critics. He responds to positive reviews with specificity, acknowledging particular observations that resonate with him. He engages with criticism thoughtfully rather than dismissively. He shares his own emotional responses to the film’s reception with a vulnerability that feels genuine rather than managed.
His response to Rajinikanth’s review has already been noted for its emotional intensity. But equally revealing was how he handled the Bollywood silence. He did not address it directly or complain about it publicly. He did not position himself as a victim of industry politics or use his social media platform to draw attention to who had and had not spoken. He focused consistently on the voices that had spoken and on the audiences whose enthusiasm was filling theatres.
This restraint was widely noted and widely appreciated. It contributed to a public perception of Dhar as someone who was making films for reasons that were fundamentally about the work rather than about industry positioning, a perception that itself fed into the authenticity that audiences felt when they watched his films and heard the genuine conviction with which they argued their points.
His pre-release post for The Revenge, in which he asked audiences not to leave before the end credits and appeared to hint at the possibility of a continuation of the Dhurandhar universe, generated widespread excitement and was circulated millions of times. This too was characteristic: Dhar understood how to communicate with his audience as a genuine participant in the conversation about his own work rather than as a marketing voice operating at a remove from the experience of actually caring about the story.
Part Nineteen: Ranveer Singh’s Journey Through the Reactions
Ranveer Singh’s public presence throughout the Dhurandhar franchise’s release cycle told its own story.
Singh had built his career on visibility, on the willingness to be outrageous in his public persona, to occupy every room he entered with maximalist energy, to make himself impossible to ignore. The contradiction between this public persona and the character he had chosen to play in Dhurandhar, a man defined by the systematic suppression of all outward personality, was one of the more interesting aspects of the franchise’s promotional campaign and something that the analysis of Singh’s career-best performance explores in detail.
But in the weeks following the sequel’s release, Singh’s social media presence shifted in a way that audiences noticed. The character energy that had occasionally crossed into chaos became something quieter, more weighted with the specific gravity of someone who had done something they knew was genuinely good and who was in the process of understanding what that meant. His responses to the massive wave of praise, from Rajinikanth, from Rajamouli, from Jr NTR, from the millions of audience members who posted their reactions with unmistakable emotion, were measured and personal.
He did not convert the praise into self-promotion. He did not use the congratulations he was receiving as platforms for announcing his next project. He sat with it. He responded to individual posts from ordinary audience members who described how the film had affected them. He shared reactions from people who had never described being moved by a film before. These choices seemed deliberate and they communicated, as clearly as any interview statement, that this film meant something different to him than his previous work.
The specific silence around Deepika Padukone’s response to the film was also something Singh navigated publicly. He did not address it. He did not explain it. He simply continued to be present with and for the audience that was celebrating what he had made, and whatever was happening in the personal dimension of the franchise’s reception remained appropriately private.
Part Twenty: The Cricket and Sports World
The conversation about Dhurandhar extended beyond the film industry. Cricket, India’s other national obsession, generated its own wave of reactions to both films.
Several Indian cricketers shared their responses to The Revenge specifically, with former players generally more effusive than current ones who might have been more sensitive to the political dimensions of the film’s content. The reactions from the cricket community reinforced the film’s status as a cultural event that crossed the conventional boundaries of film audience versus sports audience.
The specific imagery in both Dhurandhar films that drew on ideas of national pride, sacrifice, and the invisible contributions of intelligence operatives to national security resonated strongly with audiences who had grown up watching cricket as a vehicle for similar feelings. The crossover made sense thematically even if it was striking in scale.
Part Twenty-One: The Middle East Controversy
Dhurandhar: The Revenge was banned in several Middle Eastern and Gulf countries, a development that generated its own wave of social media commentary and that added an international dimension to the already-complex conversation around the franchise’s political content.
The ban was read in various ways. For supporters of the film, it was evidence that the film had made an impact, that it had said something real about geopolitics rather than manufacturing a comfortable fiction, and that its willingness to deal honestly with the India-Pakistan relationship had consequences beyond mere domestic conversation. For critics of the film’s political content, the ban was read as evidence of precisely the kind of one-sided nationalism they had been critiquing.
The ban also affected the film’s overseas numbers, since the Gulf region is a significant market for Hindi cinema. The fact that the film nonetheless crossed 1,500 crore rupees worldwide within its first two weeks, despite losing access to an important territory, was cited by analysts as evidence of how exceptional the demand for the film was in the markets where it could screen.
Part Twenty-Two: The Propaganda Debate’s Deeper Dimension
The question of whether Dhurandhar was propaganda or art, or whether it could be both simultaneously, was debated across social media with an intensity that reflected genuine disagreement about what films are for and what responsibilities filmmakers have.
The case for viewing it as propaganda focused on specific choices the film makes: its loose inspiration in real events that it presents in a particular national light, its characterization of Pakistani institutions as uniformly adversarial, and its treatment of Indian intelligence operations as morally straightforward even when they involve violence and deception. Critics argued that these choices were not value-neutral storytelling decisions but were ideologically loaded framings that reinforced a particular political perspective on the India-Pakistan relationship.
The case against this reading focused on several counterarguments. Dhar’s previous film, Uri: The Surgical Strike, had been subject to similar criticism and had similarly generated enormous audience enthusiasm that crossed political lines. The representation of an adversarial Pakistan in Indian espionage thrillers is not a specific ideological innovation of this film but a convention of the genre going back decades. And the film’s actual treatment of its Pakistani characters, particularly Rehman Dakait and the community of Lyari, was arguably more nuanced and more humanizing than most Indian films of any genre had managed.
The themes and symbolism analysis on InsightCrunch explores this tension in detail, noting that the film’s most interesting quality is its willingness to hold moral complexity rather than resolve it into comfortable nationalism. The question of whether that complexity is sufficient, given the film’s framing of the central mission, is one that the debate around the film’s politics never fully resolved.
What the social media conversation made clear is that in 2026 India, there is no version of a film about intelligence operations, Pakistan, and national security that can simply be entertainment. Every choice a filmmaker makes in this terrain is read as a political choice by at least some portion of the audience. Whether that is the filmmaker’s responsibility or the audience’s projection is itself a contested question.
Part Twenty-Three: The Box Office as Social Statement
By the end of The Revenge’s first week, Dhurandhar: The Revenge had crossed 1,000 crore rupees worldwide. By the end of its second week, it was approaching 1,500 crore rupees. The social media conversation about its box office performance became, in itself, a form of cultural commentary.
For audiences who had loved both films, the numbers were validation, evidence that the gamble of making an uncompromising, morally complex, extremely long spy film had been rewarded by an audience that was ready for exactly that kind of cinema. For those who had criticized the film’s politics, the numbers were troubling evidence of how much appetite existed for nationalist narratives presented with high production values and genuine craft.
For industry observers trying to understand what the franchise meant for the future of Hindi cinema, the box office was both data and argument. The argument was simple: here is proof that you can make a four-hour film about geopolitics and intelligence operations without movie-star swagger designed to make the audience comfortable, and the audience will come. Twice.
The records broken by the Dhurandhar franchise covers the full scope of what the two films accomplished commercially.
Part Twenty-Four: Why the South Spoke and Bollywood Didn’t
The central question that the social media record of Dhurandhar raises, and that no single explanation fully answers, is why the most enthusiastic and consistent praise came from Telugu and Tamil film industries rather than from the Hindi film industry that produced the film.
Several explanations circulate, and they are not mutually exclusive.
The first is simply quality recognition across competitive lines. This explanation holds that directors and actors from Telugu cinema recognized something in Dhurandhar that their Bollywood counterparts also recognized but were less willing to acknowledge publicly: that the film had achieved at a level that implicitly raised the bar for everyone. For a Telugu filmmaker who had himself been building films at this level of ambition and scale, praising Dhurandhar cost nothing. For a Bollywood star whose own recent output might be unfavorably compared with what Dhar had accomplished, the calculus was different.
The second explanation involves the specific political content of the films. Several of Bollywood’s biggest stars have been careful, for various reasons, to maintain a public persona that does not align too closely with any specific political narrative. Dhurandhar, with its clear inspiration in real events and its treatment of the India-Pakistan relationship, is precisely the kind of film that could generate controversy for any star who praised it in the wrong political climate. Staying silent was a risk management decision.
The third explanation, which some in the industry discussed privately and others stated publicly, involves the interpersonal dynamics of Bollywood’s star ecosystem. Ranveer Singh’s relationship with his contemporaries has always been complicated by his willingness to be outsized, to claim space and attention in ways that occasionally chafe. A film this successful, by an actor this visible, could generate something less generous than professional admiration in colleagues who were navigating their own career anxieties.
The fourth explanation involves Deepika Padukone specifically. The conspicuous absence of public support from Singh’s wife, who is herself one of Bollywood’s biggest stars and who has her own massive social media following, was interpreted by many observers as evidence of personal friction that it would be inappropriate to speculate about in detail. What it communicated publicly, regardless of its private causes, was a silence that was louder than almost any of the other absences because of its specific personal dimension.
None of these explanations is fully satisfying on its own. Together they paint a picture of an industry in which genuine artistic recognition is complicated by exactly the kinds of anxieties, rivalries, and political calculations that make the Dhurandhar franchise’s own themes about performance, loyalty, and betrayal so resonant.
Part Twenty-Five: The Audience Voices That Mattered Most
For all the significance of celebrity reactions, the most important social media voices in the Dhurandhar conversation were ordinary audience members.
The posts from people describing watching the first film three or four times. The reactions from people outside India, from the Indian diaspora in North America and the United Kingdom, who described feeling a specific kind of pride and recognition watching a Hindi film that treated their heritage’s geopolitical reality with seriousness rather than jingoistic cartoon. The posts from young viewers who had never described being genuinely moved by an Indian film before and who were struggling to articulate what had happened to them in the theatre.
The viral post from a viewer who wrote that they had never watched Hindi Bollywood films but had seen Dhurandhar Part 1 three times and planned to watch Part 2 again soon, and that the films had a kind of cinematic pull that was hard to ignore, captured something essential about what the franchise had accomplished. It had crossed the usual audience segmentation. It had found viewers who were not its assumed audience. It had done what the greatest popular entertainments always do, which is to make people who thought they did not care about its genre discover that they do.
These audience responses were ultimately more revealing than the industry ones, because they were not filtered through professional obligation or industry politics or risk calculation. They were people in theatres, on their phones, trying to describe an experience that had surprised them. And the dominant register of those descriptions, across both films and across two years of conversation, was some variation of: I did not expect to feel this much.
Part Twenty-Six: What the Conversation Reveals About Indian Cinema in 2026
Stepping back from the individual tweets and posts to look at the pattern of the entire conversation, several things become clear about where Indian cinema is at this moment.
The first is that the old hierarchy, in which Bollywood’s approval was the currency that mattered most in the national conversation about film, has genuinely eroded. It was eroded by the pan-India successes of the Telugu and Tamil industries, by the global recognition of films like RRR, and by the growing sophistication of an audience that does not need Bollywood’s biggest stars to tell them what is worth watching. Dhurandhar’s franchise demonstrated that this erosion had advanced further than anyone had mapped. A film made by a Hindi director, starring Hindi film stars, produced by a Mumbai production company, found its most generous and most widely amplified critical reception in Hyderabad and Chennai rather than in Mumbai.
The second is that the relationship between political content and artistic merit in Indian cinema is becoming more contested rather than less, as the industry’s most ambitious filmmakers are consistently drawn to stories that cannot be separated from their political context. Dhurandhar is not an anomaly in this regard. It is the franchise that made the tension most visible by being so good at what it was doing that dismissing it on political grounds required explicitly choosing politics over aesthetics.
The third is that social media has changed what it means for a film to succeed culturally. Box office numbers matter. Critical reviews matter. But in the 2026 Indian cinema landscape, the social media record of a film’s reception, who spoke, who stayed silent, who praised and who criticized and from what vantage point, is itself a form of cultural artifact that tells you something about the moment the film emerged from.
The Dhurandhar franchise’s social media record tells you that India in 2025 and 2026 was a place where a film about intelligence, identity, loyalty, and national security could be simultaneously the biggest commercial success in years, the subject of a genuine debate about propaganda and art, and a mirror in which the Indian film industry’s internal anxieties were reflected with unusual clarity. That is a lot for two spy thrillers to accomplish. Aditya Dhar set out to make films that trusted their audience. The audience’s response, measured in both box office receipts and in the authenticity of the social media conversation that surrounded the films, suggests he was right to do so.
Part Twenty-Seven: The Director’s Legacy in the Social Conversation
Aditya Dhar’s emergence as a public intellectual presence, not merely a director but a voice that people followed for his ideas about storytelling, Indian cinema, and the relationship between entertainment and purpose, was itself one of the franchise’s most interesting byproducts.
By the end of The Revenge’s theatrical run, Dhar had established himself as someone whose public communications were worth reading not for promotional value but for genuine content. His responses to celebrity reviews were not boilerplate gratitude. They were specific, emotionally authentic exchanges that created the sense of a real conversation. His engagement with critics was thoughtful rather than defensive. His communication with ordinary audience members about what their responses meant to him felt personal rather than managed.
This public persona, which the franchise’s success had given him a platform to develop, will be part of what makes Dhurandhar a cultural moment as well as a commercial event. Directors who become genuine public intellectual presences are rare in any film industry. Dhar’s willingness to be fully present in the conversation about his own work, without hiding behind press release language or the protective distance of celebrity, made the franchise feel like something more than entertainment even to people who had not seen either film.
Frequently Asked Questions
Which South Indian star was the first to publicly praise Dhurandhar 2?
Vijay Deverakonda was among the earliest to respond on the day of release, followed closely by Allu Arjun. Both posted within hours of the March 18 previews. Jr NTR and Mahesh Babu followed on March 19 and 20.
Did Amitabh Bachchan ever comment on either Dhurandhar film?
Based on the publicly available record through early April 2026, Amitabh Bachchan did not post publicly about either Dhurandhar or Dhurandhar: The Revenge, despite being active on social media throughout both films’ theatrical runs.
What specifically did SS Rajamouli say about Dhurandhar 2 that stood out?
Rajamouli said the sequel surpassed the original in both scale and soul, described the writing as creating genuine tension charged with emotion, called a specific scene with Ranveer Singh a masterclass in acting, and said that the audience remains glued to the seat till the last frame. The specificity of his praise, which named a particular scene and particular performers, distinguished it from generic endorsements.
Why did Prakash Raj criticize the South Indian stars who praised Dhurandhar 2?
Prakash Raj used the phrase signs of obligations are spreading South too, implying that the praise from Telugu and other South Indian stars might reflect political or professional obligations rather than genuine artistic admiration. He did not specify what obligations he meant. His criticism generated significant backlash from audiences and from supporters of the film.
Did any Bollywood Khan praise either Dhurandhar film?
Aamir Khan’s name appears in reports of those who praised Dhurandhar 2 based on some sources, though the publicly available tweets from the three major Khans, Shah Rukh, Salman, and Aamir, were not confirmed as substantive reviews in the primary social media record. The narrative of Bollywood Khan silence around the franchise was a central element of the social media conversation.
Was Ranveer Singh bothered by Deepika Padukone’s silence?
Singh did not address this publicly. He continued to engage warmly with audience reactions and with the celebrity praise the film received and did not draw attention to any absences by name.
Did Rajinikanth’s praise for Dhurandhar 2 help its box office performance?
It coincided with the film’s continued strong second-week performance. Whether it was causal is impossible to determine, but it generated enormous additional coverage and social media amplification that would have kept awareness of the film high during a period when films typically face declining audience interest.
Was Dhurandhar genuinely banned in the Middle East?
The film faced bans or restrictions in several Gulf and Middle Eastern countries, which affected its overseas collection, though the film nonetheless crossed 1,500 crore rupees worldwide within its first two weeks.
Did Aditya Dhar respond to criticism of the film as propaganda?
Yes, in multiple interviews. He defended the film’s historical grounding and its relationship to real events, arguing that depicting those events was not the same as fabricating a political narrative. He did not dismiss critics but engaged with the substance of their concerns while maintaining his defense of the creative choices he made.
How did the Dhurandhar franchise change the conversation about what a Bollywood film can be?
It demonstrated that a Hindi film could be operationally long, narratively complex, morally ambiguous, and commercially dominant simultaneously. It showed that audiences in India and globally were willing to invest emotional energy in a film that trusted them to follow a dense geopolitical narrative rather than offering them a simplified version of its story. And it initiated a conversation about the relationship between Bollywood’s social media culture and genuine artistic recognition that will influence how films are received and discussed for years.
Conclusion: What the Voices Told Us
The social media record of the Dhurandhar franchise is, in aggregate, one of the more revealing documents about Indian cinema and Indian culture in the mid-2020s that we have.
It told us that the film’s own industry was deeply ambivalent about what it had produced, unable to celebrate a colleague’s success in the unambiguous way that the achievement warranted, constrained by a mixture of professional anxiety, political calculation, and interpersonal dynamics that the public conversation could see but not fully decode.
It told us that the South Indian film industry, which had spent the previous decade building its own pan-India credibility through a series of films of extraordinary ambition, responded to Dhurandhar with the generosity of people who recognize quality because they have themselves pursued it. Rajinikanth’s box office ka baap was not a diplomatic gesture. It was an assessment from someone who had been doing this for fifty years and knew when he was watching something exceptional. Rajamouli’s review was not promotional support. It was a filmmaker’s recognition of another filmmaker’s achievement.
It told us that genuine cinematic ambition, the kind that refuses to compromise its length, its density, or its moral complexity for the sake of conventional commercial wisdom, can still find a massive audience in India if it is executed with sufficient craft and conviction. The eight million seats filled on opening day, the 1,500 crore rupees that accumulated over two weeks, the second and third viewings that audiences documented on social media, all of this was the audience’s vote cast in the most direct way possible: with their presence and their money.
And it told us, perhaps most profoundly, that the conversation about what a film means does not end when the film ends. It continues in the space between the tweets, in the silence of the names that did not appear, in the specificity of the reviews that went beyond praise into genuine critical engagement. The Dhurandhar franchise generated this kind of conversation at a scale that very few Indian films ever have, and what that conversation reveals about Indian cinema, Indian politics, and Indian audiences in 2025 and 2026 is something that will be studied and referenced long after the box office numbers have been superseded by the next record-breaking release.
Aditya Dhar set out to make films that said something real and trusted an audience smart enough to receive it. The record of how India responded, voices from every corner of the subcontinent’s film culture, from the greatest Tamil actor alive to a first-time viewer who had never cared about Hindi cinema before, suggests that he succeeded at something beyond the commercial measure of success. He made films that mattered. The conversation that surrounded them proved it.
Part Twenty-Eight: The Trailer Launch and What Happened Online
The release of the Dhurandhar trailer in November 2025 was not simply a promotional event. It was a cultural detonation. The four-minute-eight-second cut that appeared on YouTube and across social platforms at precisely the agreed-upon time was watched twenty million times within its first twenty-four hours and generated an immediate and sustained wave of social media commentary that set the parameters for how the film would be discussed for weeks before its release.
What the trailer accomplished that most Bollywood trailers in recent memory had failed to do was create genuine mystery. It revealed tone, character, and visual language. It confirmed that Ranveer Singh was doing something categorically different from anything he had done before. It showed enough of Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman Dakait, specifically the stillness, the coldness, the quality of controlled menace that the character required, to confirm that this was going to be one of the great villain performances in recent Hindi cinema. But it concealed plot almost entirely, which in the era of over-explained trailers that give away the film’s third-act reveals was itself a statement of confidence.
The reaction from ordinary social media users established several recurring themes that would define the conversation about the film throughout its run. One was the immediate elevation of Akshaye Khanna. The actor had spent recent years being consistently excellent in a series of films that had not quite captured the national imagination, and his presence in the Dhurandhar trailer, in a role clearly written for his particular gift for cold intelligence, generated a surge of appreciation that preceded the film’s release by weeks. Someone tweeted that Akshaye Khanna is the major aura farmer of the Dhurandhar trailer, a phrase that captured something true about what the brief glimpses of the character communicated.
Another recurring theme was the trailer’s treatment of scale. Indian cinema audiences had been trained to recognize certain visual signifiers of budget and ambition, and the Dhurandhar trailer deployed those signifiers with a precision that signaled without ostentation. The Lyari sequences, with their density and authenticity, stood in sharp contrast to the location tourism that typically characterized Bollywood spy thrillers. The action sequences, brief as they were in the trailer, communicated real physical stakes rather than the weightless digital choreography that had become increasingly common in the genre. Several posts from directors and cinematographers commented on the visual language of the trailer specifically, praising Vikash Nowlakha’s cinematography and the production design in terms that reflected professional recognition rather than fan enthusiasm.
The reaction from actors outside Bollywood to the trailer was itself notable. Before the film had even screened, before any public reviews existed, several Telugu stars had posted about the trailer’s impact, registering their anticipation for what the full film would deliver. This pre-release endorsement from the South, which would amplify dramatically once the film itself released, was a forecast of the pattern that would define the franchise’s entire social media life.
Part Twenty-Nine: The Pre-Release Conversation That Set the Stage
Between the trailer’s release in November 2025 and the film’s December 5 opening, the social media conversation about Dhurandhar functioned as a kind of extended cultural negotiation about what kind of film it was and what kind of audience it was for.
One school of thought, represented most visibly in the fan communities of the film’s cast, treated the film as primarily a star vehicle and engaged with it accordingly: posting about Ranveer Singh’s transformation, counting down to release, sharing costume details and location reveals with the granular enthusiasm of dedicated followers. This was legitimate engagement but it existed at some distance from what the film itself turned out to be.
A more interesting conversation happened among people who were engaging with the film as a text rather than a celebrity event. The discussions about Aditya Dhar’s filmmaking approach, about the specific creative challenges of the spy thriller genre in Indian cinema, about the political and historical material that was loosely inspiring the film’s narrative, these conversations attracted thoughtful participants and generated a quality of pre-release discourse that was unusual for a mainstream Bollywood release.
The comparison with Uri: The Surgical Strike that many online conversations engaged with was particularly revealing. Uri had been a tightly constructed, commercially efficient film that accomplished its goals with admirable economy. Dhurandhar was announcing itself as something more expansive, more willing to sit with ambiguity, and more committed to the kind of world-building that Uri had not attempted. For those who had loved Uri’s discipline, there was genuine question about whether the Dhurandhar approach, with its novelistic scope and its comfort with moral complexity, would deliver on the promise the trailer was making.
The answer that December 5 provided, and that the subsequent weeks confirmed through word-of-mouth that turned audiences into advocates, was emphatic. But the pre-release conversation established the intellectual seriousness with which the most engaged segment of the film’s potential audience was approaching it, and it created a context in which the film’s eventual quality could be recognized rather than having to announce itself without reference to any prior expectation.
Part Thirty: The Akshaye Khanna Effect
No aspect of the social media reaction to Dhurandhar was more widely noted and more genuinely moving, in a specifically cinematic sense, than the response to Akshaye Khanna’s performance as Rehman Dakait.
Khanna occupies a peculiar position in Hindi cinema. He is widely acknowledged by people who follow the craft of acting as one of the finest screen performers India has produced in the past three decades. His work in films like Dil Chahta Hai, Tashan, Tanu Weds Manu, and Ittefaq has demonstrated a range and a precision that most of his contemporaries cannot match. And yet his career has been characterized by a recurring pattern of exceptional performances in films that did not capture the national imagination, a gap between critical appreciation and commercial recognition that had defined his trajectory for years.
Dhurandhar changed that. Not just commercially, though the film’s success certainly brought his performance to an audience larger than any he had reached in years, but in the quality and specificity of the public recognition his work received. The social media response to Rehman Dakait was not merely appreciative. It was analytical in a way that is relatively rare for online discussion of film performance.
People wrote about the specific qualities that made Khanna’s Rehman exceptional: the stillness that was its own form of menace, the intelligence behind the eyes that never oversold its own presence, the physical authority that came from discipline rather than from the ostentatious physicality that is the more common shorthand for screen power. They wrote about the specific scenes that demonstrated those qualities, the introduction sequence, the table scene with Hamza, the moments of genuine affection toward his community that made him something other than a cartoon villain.
The response to Khanna’s performance became its own sub-conversation within the larger Dhurandhar discourse. People who had followed his career for years felt a specific kind of joy at watching audiences discover what they had known for decades. People who were encountering him for the first time went looking for his earlier work and reported being astonished by what they found. And the critical consensus that emerged around the performance, that it was among the finest villain portrayals in Hindi cinema’s history, carried the weight of genuine observation rather than hyperbole.
The character analysis of Rehman Dakait explores what makes the performance so distinctive from a technical and dramatic perspective.
Part Thirty-One: R. Madhavan and the Character of Ajay Sanyal
Among the more sophisticated elements of the celebrity reaction to Dhurandhar was the specific and repeated attention given to R. Madhavan’s performance as Ajay Sanyal, the RAW officer who conceives and manages Operation Dhurandhar from within the Indian intelligence apparatus.
Madhavan’s role is, by its nature, less spectacular than either Ranveer Singh’s Hamza or Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman. He is the institutional man, the handler, the figure who sends others into danger and must live with what that means. The character requires an actor capable of projecting enormous internal weight while doing relatively little externally, which is a far more demanding task than it sounds. The social media conversation recognized this with a frequency that was gratifying to observe.
Several of the celebrity reactions specifically called out Madhavan by name. SS Rajamouli praised his effortlessness and his dominance of every frame. Jr NTR said it was fire to watch him. Allu Arjun referenced the grace of his performance. The repetition across independent reviews of the same specific appreciation for the same specific quality, Madhavan’s ability to carry the moral weight of the story without announcing that he is carrying it, spoke to something genuinely exceptional about the performance.
Within the broader social media conversation, Madhavan’s own engagement with the franchise’s reception was warmly appreciated. He responded to the celebrity reviews with genuine gratitude and with the specific humor and warmth that his public persona has always communicated. His statement that his screen presence was limited in the first part, offered with characteristic honesty in an interview before the sequel released, was widely shared as an example of a senior actor who is secure enough in his own reputation to be honest about the demands of specific roles.
The character study of Ajay Sanyal illuminates what Madhavan brought to the role and why the performance registers so differently from comparable handler characters in spy thrillers.
Part Thirty-Two: The Cast’s Own Social Media Presence
The social media dynamics of the Dhurandhar franchise were not only defined by external voices reacting to the films. The cast’s own engagement with the reception created another layer of the conversation that was often as revealing as the celebrity reviews.
Sanjay Dutt’s engagement with the franchise was consistent with his public persona: direct, enthusiastic, and personally invested in a way that communicated genuine pride in the work rather than mere promotional obligation. His character, S.P. Choudhary Aslam, had generated particular discussion for the moral complexity it required and the way Dutt had navigated a role that placed him in territory categorically different from the outlaw characters that had defined much of his popular image. The character analysis of S.P. Choudhary Aslam covers how the film uses Dutt’s specific screen presence to complicate the character’s ambiguity.
Arjun Rampal’s navigation of the franchise’s reception was quieter but equally genuine. His character, Major Iqbal, is the film’s most purely institutional figure, the representative of a military-intelligence establishment whose methods and motivations are never fully visible. The restraint the role required was difficult and was rarely discussed in the celebrity reactions, most of which naturally gravitated toward the more conspicuous performances. Rampal’s own social media engagement acknowledged the less glamorous demands of the role with a professionalism that was characteristic.
Sara Arjun’s response to the franchise’s reception was perhaps the most personally moving, given that Dhurandhar represented a new level of visibility for a performer who had previously been known primarily for child roles and regional language films. Her father’s public note of pride in her achievement, shared on social media, was widely appreciated as an authentic expression of familial joy rather than a promotional gesture.
Part Thirty-Three: The International Conversation
The social media reaction to Dhurandhar was not limited to India, or to Indians. The film’s performance in international markets, particularly in North America, the United Kingdom, and Australia, generated a conversation that added dimensions to the domestic discourse.
For the Indian diaspora, the film carried particular weight. It was a film about the geopolitical reality that the diaspora had often felt was misunderstood or oversimplified in Western media, and it treated that reality with the kind of seriousness and complexity that validated the diaspora’s own sense of their heritage’s political texture. The social media posts from diaspora viewers in North America were among the most emotionally intense in the entire corpus of reactions, expressing not just admiration for the film but relief and recognition at seeing their background’s complexity rendered honestly on screen.
For non-Indian viewers who encountered the film, the reactions were more varied. Those who came to it without preconceptions about Bollywood, who had been recommended it by Indian friends or who had discovered it through the social media buzz, often expressed genuine surprise at its quality. The specific expectations that the word Bollywood carries in Western cultural contexts, expectations of song and dance and melodrama that the Dhurandhar films systematically refuse, meant that international viewers who discovered the films were often encountering something that exceeded their assumptions in every direction.
The film’s IMDB reviews from international viewers offer a particularly interesting cross-section of this dynamic. Viewers from contexts entirely outside South Asian geopolitics described being gripped by the film’s narrative, moved by its performances, and impressed by its ambition, without having any of the cultural background that informed domestic Indian reactions to the film’s political content. This universality of emotional engagement, across political and cultural contexts, was cited by defenders of the film in the propaganda debate as evidence that the film’s human dimensions were not reducible to its political framing.
Part Thirty-Four: The Controversy of the Ranveer Singh Bhoota Kola Incident
The Dhurandhar franchise generated controversy from a direction that had nothing to do with the film’s content when, during a promotional event at the International Film Festival of India in Goa in December 2025, Ranveer Singh received backlash for mimicking a sacred Bhoota Kola ritual associated with the Tulu people’s religious traditions.
The incident was a reminder that the franchise existed within a broader social and cultural context that could generate friction with communities who felt their traditions were being disrespected. Singh issued a formal apology. An FIR was filed against him in January 2026. The social media conversation around the incident ran parallel to the film’s ongoing theatrical success and the wave of celebrity reactions to it, creating a complicated picture of a franchise that was simultaneously achieving record-breaking cultural resonance and generating genuine hurt among specific communities.
The incident became part of the social media record of the Dhurandhar franchise in a way that its defenders and its critics both referenced for different purposes. For those who saw the film itself as culturally insensitive in its political content, the Bhoota Kola incident confirmed a pattern of casual disregard for communities outside the film’s primary cultural frame. For those who separated the incident from the film, it was an individual misstep that was handled with an appropriate apology and that should not define the franchise’s overall significance.
The question of how to hold both the genuine artistic achievement of the films and the genuine cultural insensitivity of specific promotional choices simultaneously is one that the social media discourse never fully resolved, which itself says something honest about the complexity of the franchise’s cultural position.
Part Thirty-Five: The Ram Gopal Varma Effect
Ram Gopal Varma’s response to Dhurandhar: The Revenge deserves its own section because it occupied a unique position in the franchise’s social media ecosystem. Varma is a filmmaker whose own career trajectory, from revolutionary early work to a complicated later period defined by both brilliant individual films and significant commercial disappointments, gives his observations about the film industry a specific weight. He has no reason to be strategic in his praise or to calibrate his reactions for professional advantage. He says what he thinks, and what he thought about The Revenge was striking.
He described the film as a horror for every filmmaker who still worships the godly hero. He called it a reset button for Indian cinema. He wrote extensively about what the film’s commercial success meant for the industry, arguing that it demonstrated the bankruptcy of a formula that had governed mainstream Indian cinema for decades: the formula in which the hero is essentially a god rather than a human being, in which conflicts are resolved by individual physical or moral superiority rather than by the messy and morally complex processes that actual human experience involves.
Dhurandhar did not operate by this formula. Hamza Ali Mazari is not a godly hero. He is a man who does terrible things for reasons that he believes are justified, who loses himself in the process of pursuing his mission, who carries costs that no triumphant action sequence can redeem. The films ask the audience to care about him not because he is virtuous but because he is human, and because the story in which he is embedded is true to something about what it means to sacrifice yourself for a cause that may not recognize or reward your sacrifice.
Varma’s articulation of what this distinction meant for Indian cinema was one of the more intellectually serious contributions to the social media conversation around the franchise, and it was widely shared among the audience that cares about film as something more than entertainment.
Part Thirty-Six: The Silence of Sanjay Leela Bhansali
Among the notable absences in the celebrity reaction to Dhurandhar: The Revenge was Sanjay Leela Bhansali. The viral tweet that catalogued the gap between who praised the film and who might have been expected to had identified this absence explicitly, noting that Bhansali, as perhaps Bollywood’s most prominent champion of big-canvas Indian filmmaking, was conspicuous in his silence.
Bhansali’s silence was interpreted differently by different observers. Some read it as evidence of the same anxious ambivalence that seemed to inform much of Bollywood’s non-reaction. Others suggested, more charitably, that Bhansali may simply have not seen the film or may have seen it and chosen to express his reaction privately rather than publicly. His reputation for privacy and his limited social media presence made the last interpretation genuinely plausible.
What the observation revealed, regardless of its cause, was how deeply the social media record of Dhurandhar’s reception had been shaped by expectation. People knew which voices should have spoken and had developed specific theories about why they had not, and those theories, true or not, became part of the franchise’s cultural legacy.
Part Thirty-Seven: The Deepika Padukone Question
The question of Deepika Padukone’s silence about the Dhurandhar franchise was the most personal and most discussed absence in the entire social media record. For most of the first film’s theatrical run and for the early period of the sequel’s release, Singh’s wife, who is herself among the most followed and most influential figures in Indian celebrity culture, did not publicly acknowledge the films.
The absence generated intense and highly varied responses. Some people, who had no information about the personal circumstances that might explain it, speculated freely about marital tensions, professional rivalry, and a range of other explanations that combined personal projection with cultural gossip. Others argued firmly that the silence was not a meaningful data point, that Padukone was under no obligation to use her platform to promote her husband’s work, and that reading significance into her choices was an exercise in invasive speculation that disrespected her autonomy.
Both positions had merit. The first was right that the absence was statistically unusual given the scale of the achievement and the normal pattern of public celebration between celebrity couples. The second was right that speculating about the private causes of a public person’s choices, absent any actual information about those causes, is an exercise that rarely produces genuine insight and often produces unfair damage.
What can be said without speculation is that the pattern of silence from the people closest to Ranveer Singh professionally and personally was itself part of the story of what the franchise exposed about Bollywood’s internal culture. The warmth that came from strangers in other industries, from the Telugu and Tamil film worlds, contrasted sharply with the restraint of those who might have been expected to be its most natural champions.
Part Thirty-Eight: The OTT and Post-Theatrical Conversation
Both Dhurandhar films generated substantial social media conversation in their post-theatrical OTT phases, which continued to introduce the films to audiences who had not caught them in theatres and generated second-wave reactions from people revisiting them with the knowledge of their sequels.
The OTT conversation had a different character from the theatrical social media response. Where the theatrical conversation was dominated by the energy of communal experience, the shared intensity of a cinema audience watching something extraordinary together, the streaming conversation was more reflective, more analytical, and more interested in the films’ craft and construction.
People posting about rewatching Dhurandhar Part 1 on streaming services after having seen The Revenge in theatres described noticing things they had missed the first time: foreshadowing in the film’s early sequences that paid off across two films, visual motifs in the cinematography that connected the two installments thematically, specific character choices that resonated differently with the knowledge of where Hamza’s story would end.
This second wave of engagement was significant because it demonstrated that the films had the kind of depth that sustained multiple viewings, that they were not simply event cinema that depended on spectacle and scale for their impact but films that rewarded closer attention. The analytical posts that emerged from this rewatching culture, some of them genuinely impressive in their close reading of the films, added a dimension to the social media record that the more immediate theatrical reaction had not fully developed.
Part Thirty-Nine: The Shashwat Sachdev Appreciation
Any complete account of the celebrity and public reactions to Dhurandhar must include the specific and sustained appreciation for Shashwat Sachdev’s musical contribution to the franchise.
Indian film music is a subject of intense and knowledgeable interest across the subcontinent, and the social media conversation about the Dhurandhar scores reflected this. Sachdev had previously worked with Dhar on Uri, and the musical vocabulary they had developed together was expanded and deepened in Dhurandhar. The background score, which functions as a continuous emotional and atmospheric element through the films’ extended runtimes, was specifically praised in celebrity reviews from SS Rajamouli, R. Madhavan, Ram Charan, Jr NTR, and Mahesh Babu, among others.
The songs from The Revenge, which mixed Hindi lyrics with regional language elements to create the sonic equivalent of the film’s pan-India aspirations, generated their own social media conversation. Specific tracks were shared and discussed with the granular enthusiasm that Indian music audiences bring to film soundtracks. Tracks were analyzed for their structural choices, for the specific emotional work they performed at particular points in the narrative, and for the way they reflected the emotional journey of characters rather than simply providing entertainment interludes.
The appreciation for Sachdev’s work was one of the more technically sophisticated threads in the broader social media reaction to the franchise, and it served as a reminder that Indian cinema audiences engage with film as a total sensory and emotional experience rather than simply as visual narrative.
Part Forty: The Legacy of the Reactions and What They Built
As the theatrical runs of both films ended and the franchise moved into cultural history, the social media record that had accumulated around them was itself an artifact worth examining.
What had been built, through millions of posts across two years, was something more than a promotional record. It was a map of what the films had meant to the people who encountered them, in all their variety and contradiction. The ecstatic reactions from Telugu cinema’s biggest stars, who had no professional reason to be generous and were generous anyway. The careful qualifications from voices in Bollywood who were navigating their own complicated relationship with what the films represented. The critical engagement from those who found the films’ politics troubling and said so with varying degrees of sophistication. The personal testimonials from ordinary viewers who described being genuinely changed by what they had watched.
Together these voices form a portrait of Indian cinema at a specific historical moment, when pan-India aspirations were being realized not by the industry most identified with national cinema but by a director whose previous film had been a single, tightly defined story and who had expanded from there into something so large and so ambitious that the industry’s normal frameworks for categorization and response were inadequate to it.
The conversation will continue as more viewers encounter the films, as critics write longer retrospective analyses, as the franchise’s influence becomes visible in the films that are greenlit in its wake. The social media record that has already accumulated, the tweets and posts and reviews and commentaries that this article has drawn upon, is the foundation of that continuing conversation. It is, in its own way, as much a document of what the Dhurandhar franchise was as either of the films themselves.
Extended Frequently Asked Questions
What was the most viewed celebrity reaction to Dhurandhar 2?
SS Rajamouli’s detailed review, which covered both installments and made specific observations about scenes, performances, and the film’s emotional architecture, was among the most widely shared celebrity responses. Rajinikanth’s brief but powerful endorsement, calling Aditya Dhar box office ka baap, may have generated more casual shares given its pithy directness and the significance of Rajinikanth breaking his normal reticence to review a film.
Did any Bollywood producer or studio head publicly praise the film?
Karan Johar, who is both an active filmmaker and one of the most visible personalities in Bollywood’s industry culture, acknowledged having FOMO about the film and expressed admiration for the buzz surrounding it, though he noted he had not yet seen it. Producers and studio executives who praised the film tended to do so through less visible channels.
How did Jio Studios respond to the social media reactions?
Jio Studios, as co-producer of both films alongside B62 Studios, amplified the celebrity reactions through their official channels. Producer Jyoti Deshpande, who was specifically named and thanked in multiple celebrity reviews for backing the creative vision of the franchise, emerged from the Dhurandhar campaign as a significant figure in discussions about institutional support for ambitious Indian cinema.
What happened to the Dhurandhar franchise’s social media presence after the theatrical runs ended?
The conversation continued through the films’ OTT releases and through retrospective discussions as the box office records were superseded by other films. The franchise maintained a presence in the ongoing national conversation about Indian cinema’s direction, with its celebrity reaction record being referenced in discussions of subsequent ambitious productions.
Were there any reactions from outside India that went viral?
Reactions from the Indian diaspora in North America, the UK, and Australia were widely shared within the diaspora community itself. International film industry figures did not significantly engage with the franchise’s social media conversation, though the films’ performances in international markets were covered by trade publications outside India.
How did the Dhurandhar social media conversation compare with the conversation around RRR or KGF Chapter 2?
The comparison is instructive. RRR and KGF Chapter 2 generated pan-India enthusiasm that crossed language and industry lines in both directions, with Hindi film industry figures enthusiastically endorsing films from Telugu and Kannada cinema. The Dhurandhar conversation was more asymmetrical: South Indian enthusiasm was not matched by comparable Bollywood generosity toward a Hindi film. This asymmetry was itself part of what made the franchise’s social media record so revealing about industry dynamics.
Did Aditya Dhar win any awards for Dhurandhar and how did the awards conversation intersect with the social media reaction?
Award nominations and wins generated their own wave of social media commentary. The franchise’s position in the awards conversation was somewhat complicated by its commercial success, as films that perform extremely well at the box office often face implicit assumptions about whether they are the right kind of cinema for critical recognition. The tension between commercial and critical validation that runs through the broader social media record of the franchise was particularly visible in the awards discourse.
What did the franchise’s social media record suggest about the future relationship between Bollywood and South Indian cinema?
It suggested that the competitive and respectful coexistence that has characterized the relationship between the industries since the pan-India phenomenon accelerated in the early 2020s will continue to be defined by which industry is currently producing the most ambitious and resonant work. The question of which industry that is is not fixed. Dhurandhar’s success demonstrated that a Hindi film made with South Indian levels of ambition and seriousness of purpose could command South Indian levels of admiration and respect. Whether Bollywood’s institutional culture will produce more films like Dhurandhar is the more important question, and one that the social media record cannot answer.
What was the most honest celebrity review of the franchise?
Several candidates for this designation exist, but Hrithik Roshan’s reaction to The Revenge, which praised the craft and performances while honestly stating disagreement with the film’s politics, was among the most intellectually engaged. SS Rajamouli’s response was the most analytically specific and the most clearly rooted in genuine cinematic engagement. And Ram Gopal Varma’s provocative description of the film as a horror for a certain type of filmmaker was the most honest about what the film’s success meant for the industry rather than simply for the film itself.
Did any international film critic or filmmaker respond to Dhurandhar?
The films did not generate significant responses from Western film critics or filmmakers in the public social media record, which reflects both the continued relative invisibility of Indian commercial cinema in Western critical discourse and the specific geopolitical content of the films, which resonated most strongly with audiences who had some existing investment in the historical and political context the narrative drew upon.
A Note on the Silences
The social media record of any cultural event is necessarily incomplete. It captures what was said publicly and by whom, but it cannot capture what was said privately, what was thought but not expressed, or what the absences in the public record actually represent.
The silence of Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, and others who did not publicly acknowledge the Dhurandhar franchise may represent professional calculation, personal discomfort with the films’ politics, interpersonal dynamics within the industry, or simply the fact that public expression of enthusiasm was not a priority for those individuals at that time. Without specific knowledge, speculation about which of these explanations is correct is an exercise in projection rather than analysis.
What the silences communicated publicly, regardless of their private causes, was a gap between the achievement and the recognition that several observers found troubling. The most comprehensive articulation of what that gap meant came not from a critic or an industry insider but from a simple social media post that went viral because it named the irony with precision: the film belonged to Bollywood but its champions were in Chennai and Hyderabad.
That observation, and the millions of engagements it received, is part of the Dhurandhar franchise’s legacy. It will be discussed alongside the box office records and the critical assessments and the performances in accounts of what this period in Indian cinema history represented. The conversation does not end with the credits.
Part Forty-One: The Vijay Deverakonda Dimension
Vijay Deverakonda’s reaction to Dhurandhar: The Revenge was among the first celebrity responses to appear in the hours surrounding the film’s paid preview screenings on March 18, 2026. The timing was significant: Deverakonda is known for posting authentic reactions rather than calculated endorsements, and his early response suggested he had genuinely engaged with the film at a preview rather than waiting to see which direction the critical wind was blowing before committing to a position.
Deverakonda’s journey as a pan-India figure had itself been complicated. His attempt to break into the Hindi market through Liger had not delivered the commercial results his Telugu fanbase had hoped for, and he had since returned to work that played to his specific strengths within his own industry’s conventions. His praise for Dhurandhar: The Revenge was therefore not merely a collegial gesture but a genuine statement of admiration from someone who had been navigating the pan-India challenge from the other direction and who recognized the specific difficulty of what Dhar and his team had accomplished.
The warmth of his response was matched by the specificity of his admiration. He was not vague about what he thought. He was direct about the film’s quality and about what he felt watching it, which in the context of the broader conversation around the franchise’s reception established him as one of the more genuine voices in the social media ecosystem that had formed around the films.
Part Forty-Two: The Anupam Kher Dimension and Bollywood’s Patriotic Wing
Within Bollywood itself, the voices that spoke earliest and most enthusiastically about Dhurandhar tended to cluster around figures who had publicly aligned themselves with the political perspective that the film’s narrative most clearly reflected. Anupam Kher was among the most visible of these voices.
Kher’s praise for the franchise was effusive and specifically patriotic in its framing. He described both films in terms that emphasized their value as expressions of national pride and as representations of the intelligence apparatus that operates in India’s defense. His enthusiasm was genuine but it also carried a political signature that distinguished it from the more cinematically focused responses from directors like Rajamouli or performers like Mahesh Babu.
This distinction mattered in the broader conversation. For audiences who shared Kher’s political orientation, his praise was validation. For audiences who were troubled by the film’s politics, Kher’s enthusiasm confirmed their suspicion that the film’s admirers were responding to its ideology rather than its artistry. For the majority of the audience, who occupied a more complicated relationship with both the film and the political spectrum it was navigating, Kher’s response was simply one data point among many in a conversation that was richer than any single framing could capture.
The pattern of Bollywood voices that did speak about the franchise being disproportionately drawn from a particular political constituency within the industry was something that several commentators noted. Whether this represented genuine ideological homogeneity among the film’s Bollywood supporters or simply the fact that people who shared the film’s political perspective were less anxious about expressing support was itself a contested question.
Part Forty-Three: The Music Industry’s Response
Beyond the film industry proper, the Dhurandhar franchise generated responses from the Indian music world that added another dimension to the social media conversation.
Shashwat Sachdev, as the composer of both films’ scores and songs, was the subject of considerable appreciative attention from the music community. Producers and artists who follow film composition closely noted the ambition of the musical architecture across both films, the way the background score built and evolved in dialogue with the narrative rather than simply accompanying it, and the specific cultural references that Sachdev wove into the compositions to reinforce the films’ pan-India character.
Singer Armaan Malik’s reaction to The Revenge, which was simply the phrase I AM BLOWN AWAY in capital letters, was one of the more widely shared immediate responses from outside the acting community. Its bluntness captured something about the film’s effect that longer reviews sometimes struggled to articulate.
Several musicians who contributed to the soundtrack posted about the experience of working on a project of this scale and ambition. Their descriptions of the creative process, the specificity of what Dhar asked for from the music, the conversations about how particular scenes should feel emotionally and therefore how the score should support or counterpoint the visual action, added context to the public conversation about the films that was otherwise difficult to access.
Part Forty-Four: The Regional Language Response
The Dhurandhar franchise’s release in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, and Malayalam, in addition to the original Hindi, created regional language conversations that ran parallel to the Hindi-language social media discourse and that sometimes diverged from it in interesting ways.
Telugu audiences, who had been primed by the wave of celebrity endorsements from their industry’s biggest names, approached the films with a specific kind of investment. They were watching something that their own stars had publicly committed to loving, which created both positive anticipation and the risk of disappointment if the films did not meet the expectations that the endorsements had set. The fact that the films did meet those expectations, and in many cases exceeded them, generated a kind of validated enthusiasm among Telugu-language audiences that had its own specific texture in the social media conversation.
Tamil audiences, who had the specific additional layer of Rajinikanth’s endorsement to process, engaged with both the films and the meta-conversation about why their superstar had chosen to publicly celebrate a Hindi film. The analysis of what Rajinikanth’s rare endorsement signified, what it said about the film, about Rajinikanth, and about the relationship between Tamil and Hindi cinema in the current moment, generated extended discussion in Tamil film circles that was as sophisticated as anything in the Hindi-language discourse.
Malayalam audiences brought to the conversation a tradition of film criticism that is among the most sophisticated in India, and their engagement with the Dhurandhar franchise was accordingly more analytically rigorous than the prevailing tone of the national conversation. Malayalam film journalism and social media commentary engaged seriously with the films’ craft, with the performances, and with the political dimensions in ways that added to the overall quality of the discourse surrounding the franchise.
Part Forty-Five: The International Film Festival Context
The appearance of Aditya Dhar and Ranveer Singh at the 56th International Film Festival of India in Goa in November 2025, shortly before the first film’s release, was itself a social media moment that generated commentary about the franchise’s position in the broader landscape of Indian cinema.
IFFI is the most prestigious film festival in India, and the presence of a major commercial production at the festival generates its own specific kind of attention, different from and sometimes in tension with the festival’s primary identity as a showcase for art cinema and international films. The choice to present Dhurandhar at IFFI was a statement about how the franchise positioned itself: as serious cinema that deserved the same contextual frame as the films shown at the festival alongside it, not merely as a commercial product seeking mainstream audiences.
The controversy that arose from Singh’s Bhoota Kola imitation during the festival was covered extensively and generated social media responses that ranged from fury to defense to attempts at nuanced analysis of what the incident revealed about how popular stars engage with cultural traditions outside their own immediate background. The subsequent apology and the FIR that followed in January 2026 kept the incident in the social media conversation longer than it might otherwise have remained, creating a complicated additional layer in the franchise’s public reception.
Part Forty-Six: What Aditya Dhar Learned from Uri
Understanding the social media reception of the Dhurandhar franchise requires understanding what came before it, and the comparison with Uri: The Surgical Strike is essential.
Uri had been a phenomenon in its own right. Released in January 2019, it had generated the How’s the Josh viral moment that became one of the defining pop culture catchphrases of that year. It had attracted enormous celebrity enthusiasm including the famous post from Prime Minister Narendra Modi that amplified its reach into the political mainstream. It had established Dhar as a director of serious commercial potential who could make a film with explicit nationalist content and secure genuine audience enthusiasm rather than merely ideological endorsement.
But Uri had also been a more conventional film than Dhurandhar. Its narrative was linear, its moral universe was clearer, and its running time was substantially shorter. The craft that went into it was real but it operated within more conventional parameters than the film that followed. The social media conversation around Uri had been defined primarily by the patriotic fervor it generated rather than by the kind of cinematic appreciation that Dhurandhar attracted.
The difference between the two conversations was itself instructive. Uri had generated How’s the Josh. Dhurandhar had generated Rajamouli’s four-paragraph masterclass analysis and Mahesh Babu’s explosion with perfect precision. The upgrade in the quality and specificity of the celebrity engagement reflected an upgrade in what the film was asking its audience to engage with. Dhar had moved from making a very good film about a specific event to making an extraordinary film about a whole world, and the reactions tracked that evolution.
Part Forty-Seven: The Trailer Breakdown Culture
One of the more interesting social media phenomena generated by the Dhurandhar franchise was the emergence of detailed trailer breakdown culture around both films. Independent video creators, film analysis channels, and cinema-focused social media accounts spent enormous amounts of time and creative energy producing frame-by-frame analyses of both trailers, speculating about plot details, identifying potential callbacks to earlier scenes, and debating the implications of specific visual choices.
This breakdown culture was evidence of an audience that was investing intellectual energy in the franchise before it had even released. The willingness to spend time analyzing a four-minute trailer at this level of granularity was a form of engagement that indicated both how much the franchise was anticipated and how intellectually active its potential audience was.
The trailer breakdown content generated its own social media currency. Particularly insightful analyses, whether they correctly predicted elements of the films or offered compelling interpretations of ambiguous details, were shared widely and became part of the pre-release conversation. The channels that produced the most popular Dhurandhar trailer analyses gained subscribers and followers during the weeks before each film’s release in numbers that reflected genuine audience appetite for this kind of intelligent engagement with popular cinema.
When the films released and it became possible to check the breakdown predictions against the actual films, a second wave of social media commentary emerged around which predictions had been correct and which had been creatively wrong in interesting ways. This recursive conversation, in which the social media ecosystem was analyzing its own prior analysis, added yet another layer to the franchise’s remarkably complex public life.
Part Forty-Eight: The Ranveer Singh Transformation Narrative
The social media response to Ranveer Singh’s performance in both Dhurandhar films was inseparable from a broader narrative about artistic transformation that the franchise activated.
Singh had spent the decade before Dhurandhar building a career on maximalist expressiveness. His performances in films like Goliyon Ki Raasleela Ram-Leela, Bajirao Mastani, Padmaavat, and Gully Boy had established him as one of Hindi cinema’s most intensely present actors, someone whose physical energy and emotional uninhibitedness were the primary instrument of his screen impact. These qualities had also, at various points, generated criticism: that his performances were too much, too loud, too relentlessly demonstrative of their own craft.
Dhurandhar required him to do the opposite of everything that had defined his screen persona. The performance required subtraction, the systematic removal of every instinct toward expressiveness and visibility. Hamza Ali Mazari is a man who cannot allow himself to be seen, and Singh played this quality with a discipline that surprised audiences who had built their understanding of him on the basis of his previous work.
The social media narrative around this transformation was one of the more genuinely moving aspects of the franchise’s reception. People who had loved Singh’s earlier work described the surprise and pleasure of discovering what happened when you asked that specific motor of expressive energy to be completely still. People who had found his earlier work too much, who had not fully committed to him as an actor despite acknowledging his undeniable energy, described being converted by what they saw in Dhurandhar.
The celebrity reactions that specifically addressed Singh’s performance were unanimous in praising the discipline and the range that the transformation demonstrated. Rajamouli’s specific call-out of a scene with the sister in the shed as a masterclass was representative of the most analytically serious engagement with what Singh had accomplished. His characterization of Singh’s work as mesmerizing both as Hamza and as Jaskirat acknowledged the dual-persona challenge that the sequel presented and that Singh met with what observers across the critical and popular spectrum described as genuinely exceptional craft.
Part Forty-Nine: The Arjun Rampal Renaissance
Alongside the conversation about Ranveer Singh’s transformation and Akshaye Khanna’s long-overdue recognition, the social media record of Dhurandhar contains a significant thread about Arjun Rampal and the role of Major Iqbal in particular.
Rampal had spent much of the decade before Dhurandhar being underestimated, cast in roles that did not challenge him to the level of his actual capability, or present in films that did not give him the material to demonstrate what he could do. The selection of Rampal for Major Iqbal, a character who required controlled menace, institutional authority, and the specific quality of danger that comes from intelligence rather than from physical force, was either an inspired choice or a lucky accident. The result was the same either way: a performance that reminded audiences who had written Rampal off as a decorative presence what he was actually capable of when the material met his strengths.
The social media appreciation for Rampal’s Major Iqbal was less granular than the appreciation for Khanna’s Rehman, partly because the character operates differently, through absence and implication rather than direct confrontation, and partly because Iqbal’s arc is less dramatically concentrated in the first film and requires the full duology to be appreciated in its totality. But within the community of people who engaged analytically with the films, Rampal’s performance was cited repeatedly as one of the elements that distinguished the franchise from conventional spy thrillers.
The character analysis of Major Iqbal covers the specific choices that made the performance work, including how Rampal navigated the challenge of making institutional menace feel genuinely dangerous without the usual tools of physical intimidation that such characters rely upon.
Part Fifty: The Gauge of India
The Dhurandhar franchise’s social media record is, ultimately, a gauge of India. Not of India as a unified entity with a single perspective, but of India as the complicated, contested, multilingual, multi-industrial, politically diverse cultural landscape that it is.
The reactions the franchise generated tell you that India in 2025 and 2026 contains audiences capable of deep, serious engagement with long, morally complex cinema. They tell you that the traditional hierarchies of the Indian film industry are genuinely shifting, that the geography of prestige and the geography of ambition no longer coincide perfectly with the geography of language. They tell you that a film about India’s geopolitical anxieties and intelligence operations can simultaneously be a work of genuine artistic merit and a source of genuine political controversy, and that both of those things can be true at once.
They tell you that the relationship between industry insiders and the work their colleagues produce is fraught in ways that are not fully visible from the outside, that professional success does not automatically generate professional generosity, and that the voices most willing to celebrate artistic achievement sometimes come from the most unexpected directions.
And they tell you, perhaps most importantly, that when a film connects with an audience at the level that Dhurandhar connected with its audiences, when it achieves the particular quality of being a film that people need to tell each other about, the social media conversation that forms around it is not simply noise. It is evidence. It is a record of what mattered and to whom and why. It is, in its own digital and ephemeral way, history.
Aditya Dhar made two films that India talked about. How India talked about them, who said what and who stayed silent and what both the speaking and the silence revealed, is the subject of this article and the subject of a conversation that will continue long after the box office numbers have been surpassed and the records have been broken again.
The Dhurandhar effect, the name given to the film’s broader cultural impact, was always bigger than the film itself. The reactions documented here prove it.
Part Fifty-One: The Conversation About What Bollywood Owes Its Own
The sustained attention to Bollywood’s silence around the Dhurandhar franchise generated a meta-conversation about professional obligation and industry culture that went well beyond the franchise itself.
At the center of this conversation was a question that fans and observers were asking with increasing explicitness: what does a major Bollywood star owe to a colleague’s success? The conventional answer, which the congratulatory post culture had codified over decades, was a brief, warm, and somewhat generic acknowledgment. This had become so standard as to be nearly meaningless. The interesting question that Dhurandhar raised was what happens when a film achieves at a level that demands more than the conventional gesture, and when the conventional gesture is not offered.
Several commentators drew parallels with how the South Indian film industry handled its successes. When RRR crossed the 1,000 crore rupee mark globally, the social media responses from across Indian cinema, including from Bollywood stars, were warm and specific and genuinely celebratory. The contrast with the Bollywood silence around Dhurandhar was noted repeatedly as evidence of a double standard: that pan-India enthusiasm for South Indian success was not being reciprocated with comparable enthusiasm for a Hindi film’s extraordinary achievement.
Whether this asymmetry reflected something specific about Dhurandhar or something broader about Bollywood’s internal culture was debated with genuine energy. The broader argument pointed to a pattern of competitive anxiety that had characterized Bollywood’s response to South Indian success for years, arguing that the same anxiety that had made Bollywood stars reluctant to fully celebrate Telugu and Tamil success was now being turned inward against a Hindi film that had achieved at a level those industries had pioneered. The film-specific argument focused on the particular political content and interpersonal dynamics that made Dhurandhar specifically uncomfortable for certain segments of the industry.
Both arguments captured something real. Neither captured everything. The complexity of why specific people said what they said, or chose to say nothing, resisted reduction to a single explanatory framework.
Part Fifty-Two: The Viral Tweet Taxonomy
The social media record of the Dhurandhar franchise contains several distinct categories of viral content, each of which served a different function in the conversation and attracted different kinds of engagement.
The first category was the sincere celebrity review: a post from a recognized figure expressing genuine admiration for specific aspects of the films. SS Rajamouli’s review of The Revenge is the paradigm case, but the category also includes Jr NTR’s, Ram Charan’s, Mahesh Babu’s, and Rajinikanth’s responses. These posts were shared because of who wrote them and because of the quality of observation they contained. They were received as endorsements and also as evidence that certain standards were being recognized.
The second category was the pointed observation about industry dynamics: posts that used the franchise’s reception to make a larger argument about how Bollywood treated its own successes. The viral tweet cataloguing who had praised the film versus who should have was the paradigm case of this category. These posts were shared because they articulated something people were already thinking and because they gave social permission to say explicitly what had been circulating as implication.
The third category was the political commentary: posts that engaged with the franchise’s content as a political text and drew conclusions about what its success meant for Indian culture or politics. Prakash Raj’s cryptic responses fell into this category, as did the appreciations from voices who saw the film’s success as a cultural victory for a particular nationalist perspective. These posts were shared most intensely within communities that already had strong political investments in the positions being expressed.
The fourth category was the personal testimony: posts from ordinary viewers describing how the films had affected them emotionally or changed their relationship to certain ideas. These posts were often the most affecting in the entire corpus, because they were operating at a remove from the professional and political calculations that shaped how industry figures engaged with the franchise, and because they communicated something authentic about what the films had accomplished in the lives of real people.
Understanding which category a viral post falls into is essential for reading the social media record accurately. The same statement, the franchise is a cultural event, means something different when it comes from Rajamouli, from a journalist analyzing industry dynamics, from a nationalist commentator, and from a first-time viewer who had never seen a film at this level before.
Part Fifty-Three: Rakesh Bedi and the Supporting Cast
The celebrity conversation about Dhurandhar was not only about its biggest names. A recurring and genuinely moving thread in the social media record was the specific appreciation for Rakesh Bedi, the veteran comedian whose performance in a more serious register surprised and moved audiences who were more familiar with his work in lighter roles.
Several reviews, including Hrithik Roshan’s initial response to the first film, specifically called out Bedi’s contribution. The observation that an actor known primarily for comedy had delivered a performance of emotional weight and technical precision, without being submerged by the broader spectacle around him, resonated with audiences who had their own relationship to Bedi’s long career and who were experiencing something like familial pride at watching him do something unexpected and excellent.
The social media appreciation for Bedi was a reminder that the franchise’s success was genuinely ensemble in nature, that the depth of the casting and the quality of attention given to every role rather than just the central ones was part of what made the films feel different from the competition. Directors and casting experts who commented on the franchise frequently cited the supporting cast choices as evidence of a filmmaker who understood that world-building requires populating your world with real people rather than filling the periphery with cardboard.
Danish Pandor, Gaurav Gera, and the other supporting players in the franchise received similarly specific appreciation from viewers who were paying attention at a level that the films rewarded. This granular appreciation, the fan who notices that a third-scene background actor has made a specific choice, the reviewer who calls out a supporting performance that most critics would pass over, is the clearest evidence that the franchise had created genuinely engaged audiences rather than merely satisfied spectators.
Part Fifty-Four: The Dialogue Writing Appreciation
Among the more specifically craft-oriented threads in the social media conversation about Dhurandhar was a sustained appreciation for the dialogue, which the detailed analysis of Dhurandhar’s dialogue writing examines in depth.
Aditya Dhar’s screenplay is notable for the economy and precision of its language. In a genre that typically relies on exposition-heavy dialogue to manage the complexity of spy thriller plots, the Dhurandhar scripts communicate character and situation through exchanges that feel organic rather than explanatory. Specific lines became quotable not in the punchy action-hero manner that Bollywood dialogue typically achieves its viral moments, through catchphrases and one-liners designed to be taken out of context, but in the manner of genuinely well-written drama, where the line’s resonance depends on understanding the character and situation it emerges from.
The appreciation for the dialogue generated a specific category of social media post: people sharing their favorite lines with context about why those particular lines worked, engaging in a form of close reading that is not usually associated with the social media response to commercial Indian cinema. The community of people who were having this conversation was smaller than the community posting general enthusiasm, but it was consistently sophisticated and it added intellectual texture to the franchise’s broader social media presence.
Part Fifty-Five: The Legacy Question
As the Dhurandhar franchise moves from current event to cultural legacy, the social media record that has accumulated around it will itself become a source. Future analyses of Indian cinema in the mid-2020s will use the pattern of who spoke and who stayed silent, who celebrated and who critiqued and what they said, as evidence about the state of the industry at a specific historical moment.
The legacy question is not primarily about box office records, which will be surpassed. It is not primarily about critical assessments, which will be revised and refined over time. It is about what the franchise contributed to the ongoing project of Indian cinema finding its own definition of what is excellent, what is ambitious, and what is worth making.
Dhurandhar’s contribution to that project was substantial. It demonstrated that a Hindi film could pursue the kind of moral complexity and narrative seriousness that the South Indian industries had been pioneering without sacrificing the emotional connection that makes commercial cinema work. It demonstrated that audiences were ready for this kind of film, that they would seek it out and return to it and advocate for it to their friends. And it demonstrated, through the pattern of its reception, that the geography of Indian cinema’s ambition was shifting in ways that the industry’s traditional power structures were not fully prepared to accommodate.
The voices documented in this article, from the thunderous endorsement of Rajinikanth to the pointed silence of figures who chose not to speak, from the granular analysis of Rajamouli to the raw enthusiasm of viewers for whom the film was a discovery, are all part of that demonstration. They are evidence of a cultural moment in which the Dhurandhar franchise asked a question about what Indian cinema could be and the audience answered with its presence, its engagement, its money, and its voice.
The Complete Record: A Final Summary of Every Major Voice
For the sake of completeness and as a reference for readers who want to locate specific responses within the broader narrative, here is a comprehensive summary of the major voices in the Dhurandhar social media conversation.
Voices That Spoke: South Indian Film Industry
SS Rajamouli praised both films, calling The Revenge a surpassing of the original in scale and soul, and delivered the most detailed and analytically specific celebrity review in the franchise’s entire social media record. He named specific scenes, specific performances, and specific qualities of the filmmaking in a way that established his response as a genuine cinematic judgment rather than a professional courtesy.
Rajinikanth delivered the most impactful single endorsement, calling Aditya Dhar box office ka baap and the film a must watch for every Indian, ending with Jai Hind in what became one of the most widely shared posts in the franchise’s history.
Allu Arjun reviewed both films in enthusiastic, specific terms. His Part 1 review praised the brilliance of the filmmaking and the versatility of Ranveer Singh. His Part 2 review described the film as patriotism with swag and an Indian story with international swag.
Jr NTR saluted the team for delivering a storm to Indian audiences, called Singh’s performance an absolute masterclass, and praised the fearless vision required to mount the project.
Mahesh Babu called The Revenge an explosion executed with perfect precision and the finest version of Ranveer unleashed.
Ram Charan offered detailed, methodical praise, calling the film raw, gripping, and impactful, and specifically acknowledging every major department from performance to music to production.
Vijay Deverakonda was among the first celebrities to post on the night of The Revenge’s paid previews, setting a tone of genuine enthusiasm that the subsequent wave of Telugu responses would amplify.
Nagarjuna described the first film as blowing his mind and as one that inspires and changes filmmaking.
Ram Gopal Varma called The Revenge a horror for filmmakers who worship the godly hero and a reset button for Indian cinema.
Voices That Spoke: Bollywood and Hindi Cinema
Hrithik Roshan praised Dhurandhar Part 1 in specific, warm terms, calling out individual performances including Akshaye Khanna and R. Madhavan. His response to The Revenge added a political qualification that became the subject of extended debate.
Alia Bhatt praised The Revenge on her Instagram story, specifically referencing the magic of the director and actor in sync.
Karan Johar acknowledged having FOMO about the film before having seen it.
Preity Zinta attended a screening and posted specifically enthusiastic praise for Ranveer Singh’s performance.
Kartik Aaryan, Ananya Panday, Ayushmann Khurrana, Anupam Kher, Sidharth Malhotra, Vicky Kaushal, Arjun Kapoor, and Rajkummar Rao all posted supportive reactions.
Armaan Malik’s blunt three-word reaction from the music industry was widely shared.
Voices That Dissented or Complicated
Prakash Raj posted cryptic and pointed responses suggesting that South Indian praise for the franchise might reflect obligations rather than genuine admiration.
Dhruv Rathee argued that the film was propaganda, and specifically that it was not even well-made propaganda.
Vishal Dadlani took indirect issue with specific factual representations in the film, recommending better information sources regarding a demonetization scene.
Voices That Were Conspicuously Silent
Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgn, Ranbir Kapoor, Shahid Kapoor, Tiger Shroff, Vidya Balan, Katrina Kaif, Varun Dhawan, Anil Kapoor, and Deepika Padukone were among the most noted absences from the public social media record of the franchise’s reception.
This list was compiled, named, and widely circulated in the social media conversation about the franchise. Its existence, the fact that someone assembled it and millions engaged with it, is itself part of the record and part of the legacy.
The conversation about Dhurandhar is not over. It will continue as long as Indian cinema is discussed as a cultural practice, as long as the question of what great ambition in Hindi films looks like is worth asking, and as long as the specific historical moment that these two films emerged from is considered worth understanding. What the social media record documented here provides is the raw material for that continuing conversation: the voices, the silences, the enthusiasm, the dissent, and the human texture of how India experienced films that changed what it thought was possible.
Part Fifty-Six: The Comparative Context of Indian Cinema Social Media
Understanding what was extraordinary about the Dhurandhar social media conversation requires understanding what the normal pattern looks like when Indian films of comparable scale release.
When Pathaan released in January 2023, the social media response was dominated by relief and celebration: Shah Rukh Khan was back after a long absence from leading roles, and the film’s success was read primarily through the lens of his personal narrative rather than as a statement about Indian cinema’s direction. The celebrity reactions were warm and numerous, but they circulated within a fairly predictable network of professional connections and loyalty. The South Indian industry’s response was positive but not particularly specific in its analysis of why the film worked.
When Jawan released later in 2023, the pattern was similar but amplified by the film’s own pan-India ambitions and by the involvement of director Atlee, whose roots in Tamil cinema created some natural bridges to the South Indian response ecosystem. But the conversation remained primarily centered on Shah Rukh Khan as a cultural phenomenon rather than on the filmmaking as a cinematic achievement.
When Animal released in late 2023, the celebrity response was more complicated: the film’s content and its masculinity politics generated genuine division, and the most interesting social media conversations were debates about whether the film’s craft redeemed its content rather than straightforward celebrations of a shared cultural achievement.
The Dhurandhar conversation was qualitatively different from all of these. It generated the kind of engagement normally associated with a film that has transcended its genre to become a genuine cultural statement. The specificity of the praise, the analytical depth of many celebrity responses, and the breadth of the social media community that formed around the franchise suggested that the films had achieved something that went beyond satisfying audience expectations in a well-executed genre exercise.
Understanding this context makes clearer why the silence from certain quarters was so notable: if the film’s achievement was visible enough to generate the quality and quantity of response it did, the absence of specific voices was not a neutral fact but a meaningful one.
Part Fifty-Seven: What the Franchise Taught the Industry
In the months following the theatrical runs of both Dhurandhar films, the Indian film industry began responding to what the franchise had accomplished in the way that industries always respond to paradigm-shifting success: by attempting to replicate its conditions.
Multiple productions announced in the aftermath of the Dhurandhar box office success cited the franchise as inspiration or as a benchmark for their own ambitions. Directors spoke publicly about the need to trust audiences with complexity. Producers discussed the possibility of releasing long films without the conventional pressure to cut them to more commercially predictable runtimes. The social media conversation around these announcements invariably included references to what Dhurandhar had proved about audience appetite.
Whether any of these subsequent productions will achieve what Dhurandhar achieved is a question that the social media record of the franchise cannot answer. What the record does answer is why the achievement was significant enough to generate this kind of industry response: because the films had demonstrated, publicly and commercially, that a specific kind of ambition was not only possible in Indian cinema but actively desired by an audience that had been waiting for someone to attempt it.
Aditya Dhar’s journey from Uri to Dhurandhar, from the tight procedural to the expansive epic, was itself a model for what artistic growth in Indian commercial cinema could look like. The franchise taught the industry that you could grow in public, that you could take an audience you had earned with a smaller story and ask them to follow you somewhere much larger, and that if you had built the trust well enough, they would follow.
Part Fifty-Eight: The Craft Appreciation That Sustained the Conversation
One of the most striking aspects of the Dhurandhar social media record over time is how the conversation shifted from initial excitement to sustained craft appreciation as the films settled into their cultural position.
The immediate reactions were dominated by emotional response: the shock of watching Ranveer Singh be completely still, the pleasure of Akshaye Khanna’s controlled menace, the satisfaction of a narrative that did what it promised without shortcuts. But as the films moved from current events to recent history, the social media conversation began attracting more technical engagement.
Cinematographers wrote about Vikash Nowlakha’s work on the films. Editors discussed the specific choices in Shivkumar V. Panicker’s cutting that distinguished the films’ pacing from conventional Indian commercial cinema. Composers analyzed what Shashwat Sachdev had accomplished in the relationship between score and image across both films’ substantial runtimes.
This second-wave technical appreciation was not separate from the emotional response that had driven the films’ initial success. It was the elaboration of that response, the attempt to understand why the films worked at the level they worked, to identify the specific choices that had made the emotional responses possible. It was, in the truest sense, the community thinking through what it had experienced.
The cinematography and visual style analysis explores the specific visual grammar of the films. The action sequences analysis examines the choreography and staging of the franchise’s most discussed set pieces. Together these analyses represent the more extended critical engagement that the franchise earned through its quality and that the social media conversation gradually generated as the films’ immediate event status gave way to considered assessment.
Part Fifty-Nine: The Fan Fiction and Franchise Speculation Ecosystem
Any discussion of the Dhurandhar social media record would be incomplete without acknowledging the enormous creative ecosystem that formed around the franchise in fan spaces.
Fan fiction, character analyses, alternative timeline speculation, casting wishes for potential future installments, and artistic tributes to specific scenes and moments accumulated in large quantities across platforms that cater to this kind of creative engagement. The quality of the most thoughtful contributions to this ecosystem was itself evidence of the depth of investment the franchise had generated.
Particularly notable were the extended character analyses that fans produced for figures like Hamza Ali Mazari, Rehman Dakait, and Yalina Jamali. These analyses drew on the specific details of the performances and the dialogue, on the character analyses that had been published professionally, and on the emotional responses of the writers themselves to create readings of the characters that were sometimes genuinely illuminating.
The speculation about Dhurandhar 3, which Aditya Dhar had hinted at through his request that audiences stay for the end credits, generated an entire sub-ecosystem of theories about where the franchise could go, which characters could return, and what new dimensions a third installment might explore. This speculation was itself a form of engagement that demonstrated investment: you do not spend time theorizing about the future of a franchise that you do not care about.
Part Sixty: The Enduring Question
The social media record of the Dhurandhar franchise ends, as all records must, somewhere incomplete. There are conversations still ongoing, assessments still forming, and voices that have not yet been heard. The franchise’s cultural life extends beyond the period documented here.
But the record that exists already is sufficient to answer the question that this article began with: what do the voices and silences around Dhurandhar reveal about Indian cinema and Indian culture in this moment?
They reveal an industry in genuine transition, where the geography of ambition and the geography of recognition are no longer perfectly aligned with the geography of language and commercial origin. They reveal an audience more ready for complexity and seriousness than the industry’s conventional assumptions had suggested. They reveal the specific ways that professional obligation, political positioning, and interpersonal dynamics shape which voices speak and which choose silence when a significant achievement demands acknowledgment.
They reveal the warmth and generosity of which the South Indian film industry is capable when it encounters work it genuinely admires, and the complicated ambivalence that Bollywood’s internal culture can generate around achievements that challenge its self-image.
And they reveal, ultimately, that great cinema generates great conversation. Not just enthusiastic conversation, not just commercially driven social media buzz, but genuine conversation about what the work means, why it works, who is affected by it and how, and what it suggests about the continuing possibility of making something that matters.
The Dhurandhar franchise made something that mattered. The conversation documented here proves it. And that conversation, which is still ongoing, is itself part of what the franchise has given to Indian cinema: not just two films, not just box office records, not just a new benchmark for ambition, but a reminder that when you make something real, people will talk about it, and what they say will itself become part of what the work was.
Comprehensive FAQ: Every Question About the Celebrity Reactions Answered
Which celebrity’s reaction to Dhurandhar was most surprising?
Rajinikanth’s endorsement of Dhurandhar: The Revenge was widely described as the most surprising and most significant celebrity reaction in the franchise’s history. Rajinikanth posts infrequently and reviews films rarely. His specific and emphatic endorsement, calling Aditya Dhar box office ka baap and declaring the film a must watch for every Indian, was unexpected in its directness and warmth and generated reactions across the Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi film industries.
Why did Bollywood’s biggest stars not congratulate Ranveer Singh?
This question does not have a definitive public answer. The possible explanations include professional calculation about the political content of the films, interpersonal dynamics within the industry that are not visible from the outside, a form of competitive anxiety about a colleague’s record-breaking success, and simple personal choice. What is clear is that the pattern was systematic rather than coincidental: too many major Bollywood figures were silent for it to reflect individual disinterest rather than some form of collective calculus.
Was Deepika Padukone’s silence discussed publicly by the couple?
Ranveer Singh did not address his wife’s silence publicly. He continued to engage with audience reactions and celebrity praise without drawing attention to specific absences. The personal dimension of the silence remained private even as the public observation of it was widespread.
Did the Bollywood silence hurt the films’ box office performance?
The films’ box office performance, which resulted in one of the highest-grossing Hindi franchises in history, does not appear to have been materially affected by the absence of congratulatory posts from certain quarters. Audience response, driven by word-of-mouth and by the enthusiastic endorsements of both South Indian industry voices and ordinary viewers, was sufficient to generate the theatrical runs both films achieved.
How did Aditya Dhar respond to the Bollywood silence?
Dhar did not address the Bollywood silence directly or draw attention to it in his public communications. He focused consistently on expressing genuine gratitude to the voices that had spoken and on engaging with the audiences who were filling theatres. His restraint in not capitalizing on the controversy of the silence was noted and appreciated by observers who respected his focus on the work.
Were there any reactions from political figures to the Dhurandhar franchise?
The franchise’s content, with its loose inspiration in real geopolitical events and its treatment of intelligence operations, attracted attention from the political sphere. Prime Minister Narendra Modi had previously engaged with Uri: The Surgical Strike in ways that had amplified that film’s reach. The broader political ecosystem around the franchise, while significant, was not primarily expressed through direct social media reactions from political figures in the way that the film industry’s response was.
Did any international film festival or critical body recognize the franchise?
The franchise’s presence at the International Film Festival of India established it within the festival circuit, though its primary reception was as mainstream commercial cinema rather than as the kind of art film that typically receives international critical recognition. Whether the franchise’s legacy will eventually attract the kind of retrospective critical attention that some commercial films achieve over time is a question that cannot yet be answered.
What was the most shared individual tweet related to Dhurandhar?
The viral tweet observing that Rajinikanth had praised a Bollywood film while Amitabh Bachchan had stayed silent, that SS Rajamouli had celebrated the franchise while Sanjay Leela Bhansali had said nothing, accumulated several million impressions and was widely credited with crystallizing the conversation about the industry dynamics the franchise had exposed. Rajinikanth’s own tweet also generated enormous engagement.
How did the franchise’s social media reception compare with international spy thrillers?
The conversation about Dhurandhar, particularly among audience members who were familiar with both international spy film conventions and Indian cinema, frequently compared the franchise with Hollywood spy thrillers in ways that were flattering to Dhar’s work. The comparison with films in the Jason Bourne franchise, which had pioneered a more grounded and morally serious approach to the spy thriller in American cinema, was cited repeatedly. The observation that Dhurandhar had done for Indian spy cinema what the Bourne films had done for Hollywood spy cinema was a recurring formulation in the more analytically ambitious social media reactions.
Did the Dhurandhar social media conversation influence subsequent casting or production decisions in Bollywood?
Several industry observers noted in the months following the franchise’s success that the specific casting choices, particularly the decision to give Akshaye Khanna a role that leveraged his specific gift for cold intelligence, had reminded producers and directors of a generation of actors whose specific qualities had been underutilized. Whether this observation translated into specific casting decisions in subsequent productions is difficult to confirm from the public record, but the conversation about the value of matching the right actor to the right character rather than simply casting the most commercially obvious choice was reinvigorated by the franchise’s success.
What does the franchise’s social media record suggest about the health of Indian cinema criticism?
The quality of the critical engagement that the Dhurandhar franchise generated, from professional critics and from the best social media commentators, suggested that the appetite for serious film criticism in India is healthy and that the tools for sustained analytical engagement with Indian commercial cinema are more developed than the conventional wisdom about social media superficiality might suggest. The analytical sophistication of SS Rajamouli’s review, the specificity of craft observations from directors and cinematographers, and the extended fan analyses of character and theme all demonstrated that the franchise had attracted exactly the audience it deserved: one capable of understanding what it was trying to do and of articulating why it succeeded.
What single observation best captures the meaning of the Dhurandhar social media conversation?
A viral tweet perhaps captured it most economically: Dhurandhar is a Bollywood film. Ideally Amitabh Bachchan should have praised it. But India’s greatest actor Rajinikanth did. The observation’s power came from the specificity of its irony and from the question it implied without explicitly asking: what does it mean for an industry when its most significant achievement in years is celebrated most enthusiastically by the industry it has always regarded as its competition? That question, and the conversation it generated, is the social media legacy of the Dhurandhar franchise.
The Articles That Tell the Whole Story
The Dhurandhar franchise has been covered comprehensively across the InsightCrunch archive. For readers who want to explore specific dimensions of the films and their world in depth, the following articles from the series cover every major aspect of the franchise:
The complete analysis of Dhurandhar Part 1 provides the foundational understanding of the first film’s narrative, themes, and craft. The complete analysis of Dhurandhar: The Revenge does the same for the sequel. The franchise complete guide maps the entire creative architecture across both films.
The character studies provide the deep dives: Hamza Ali Mazari, Rehman Dakait, SP Choudhary Aslam, and Major Iqbal. The comparison with Uri traces Aditya Dhar’s creative evolution. The themes and symbolism analysis explores the films’ deeper intellectual architecture. And the ending explained decodes what it all means for Hamza’s journey and for what comes next.
Together these articles and the social media record documented in the present article constitute a comprehensive account of one of Indian cinema’s most significant cultural events in the 2020s. The Dhurandhar franchise was not simply a successful film franchise. It was a conversation about what Indian cinema is, what it could be, and who gets to decide. That conversation is still ongoing.
Afterword: On Recording What Matters
There is a particular challenge in writing about social media reactions to a cultural event while that event is still fresh. The record is incomplete because the conversation is ongoing. Assessments that seem definitive today will be revised tomorrow as new information emerges and as perspectives shift with time.
What this article has attempted is not a final judgment but a faithful recording. Every major voice mentioned in this article actually spoke or actually chose silence. Every tweet referenced was posted by the account credited. The pattern of who engaged and who did not, of which industry was generous and which was ambivalent, is not interpretation but observation.
The observation matters because of what it reveals. When Rajinikanth broke his reticence to post about a film from another language industry, calling its director box office ka baap and urging every Indian to see it, he was making a statement about quality that transcended industry boundaries. When SS Rajamouli wrote four paragraphs about the specific excellence of particular performances and particular scenes, he was doing what the best criticism always does: articulating something that was felt before it was understood. When Jr NTR saluted a team for delivering a storm, he was expressing the specific respect that one ambitious storyteller feels for another.
These voices, from outside the industry that made the franchise, are the primary record of what the films achieved. The record of who stayed silent is, in its own way, equally clear about what the films exposed.
Indian cinema is large enough and complex enough to contain both the enthusiastic embrace and the calculated avoidance that the Dhurandhar franchise generated. The audience it found, across regions and languages and industries and national boundaries, is large enough to make the absences irrelevant to the commercial record. But they are not irrelevant to the cultural record.
The social media conversation around Dhurandhar is part of the franchise’s legacy because it says something true about the industry the franchise emerged from and about the moment it emerged from. What it says is: quality was recognized, ambition was rewarded, and the most generous responses came from the most unexpected directions. That is not a simple story about Bollywood’s failures or about South Indian cinema’s virtues. It is a complicated story about how creative achievement moves through a large and diverse cultural ecosystem, finding its champions where it finds them, leaving its mark in the pattern of who spoke and why.
The films themselves are the foundation. The conversation they generated is the superstructure. Together they constitute the Dhurandhar effect, which was always larger than any single film, any single performance, or any single celebrity’s tweet could capture.
It was India, in all its complexity, responding to something it recognized as genuinely excellent. And that response, with all its warmth and enthusiasm and pointed silences, is worth recording.
The Voices at a Glance: A Reference Table
For readers who want a quick reference to who said what about each film, this summary presents the essential record in condensed form.
Dhurandhar Part 1 (Released December 5, 2025)
Hrithik Roshan praised the film extensively, specifically calling out Akshaye Khanna, Ranveer Singh, R. Madhavan, and Rakesh Bedi. He expressed inability to get the film out of his mind and anticipation for part two. His was the most prominent Bollywood celebrity reaction to the first installment.
Allu Arjun called the film brilliantly made with fine performances, the finest technical aspects, and amazing soundtracks. He described Ranveer Singh’s presence as magnetic and called Aditya Dhar an ace filmmaker with full swag.
The wider Telugu industry response to Part 1 was uniformly positive but less intensely public than the sequel would generate, partly because the first film’s scale of achievement was still being processed at the time and partly because the sequel’s release would provide a natural prompt for retrospective appreciation of the franchise as a whole.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge (Released March 19, 2026)
SS Rajamouli delivered the most detailed and analytically specific celebrity review, covering both films, praising the writing’s ability to create genuine emotional tension, calling out a specific scene as a masterclass, and declaring the sequel superior to its predecessor.
Rajinikanth’s box office ka baap endorsement was the single most viral moment in the franchise’s social media history.
Jr NTR delivered a detailed review praising the entire team, calling Singh’s performance an absolute masterclass and Aditya Dhar’s conviction fearless.
Mahesh Babu called the film an explosion executed with perfect precision and the finest version of Ranveer unleashed.
Ram Charan delivered methodical, department-by-department praise, describing the film as raw, gripping, and impactful.
Allu Arjun returned with equal enthusiasm for the sequel, describing it as patriotism with swag and Ranveer Singh as on fire.
Nagarjuna said the film blew his mind and changes filmmaking.
Ram Gopal Varma called it a horror for filmmakers who worship the godly hero and a reset button for Indian cinema.
Alia Bhatt praised the film on Instagram Stories, noting the magic of director and actor in complete sync.
Karan Johar acknowledged FOMO.
Anupam Kher, Preity Zinta, Kartik Aaryan, Ananya Panday, Ayushmann Khurrana, Sidharth Malhotra, Vicky Kaushal, Arjun Kapoor, and Rajkummar Rao all posted positive reactions.
Prakash Raj posted cryptic challenges to the South Indian praise, suggesting obligations rather than genuine admiration.
Dhruv Rathee argued the film was not even well-made propaganda.
Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Aamir Khan, Ajay Devgn, Ranbir Kapoor, Shahid Kapoor, Deepika Padukone, and numerous other Bollywood figures did not publicly engage.
This is the complete record. It will not be the last word on what the Dhurandhar franchise meant to Indian cinema, but it is an honest account of what the first round of conversation revealed. The rest of the story belongs to time, and to the films themselves, which were always larger than the conversation about them.
The Numbers Behind the Conversation
No account of the Dhurandhar social media record is complete without acknowledging the box office foundation that gave the conversation its weight.
Dhurandhar Part 1 grossed 1,350.83 crore rupees worldwide in its full theatrical run. It was the highest-grossing Indian film of 2025, the third highest-grossing Hindi film of all time, and the highest-grossing Adults Only certified Indian film in history. It crossed the 1,000 crore rupee mark globally on December 26, 2025, three weeks after release. It grossed over 2 million US dollars in North America in its opening weekend.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge opened to 236.63 crore rupees globally on its first day, making it the fourth-highest opening day for any Indian film in history. It crossed 1,000 crore rupees worldwide in its first week. By its fifteenth day it had accumulated 1,492.17 crore rupees globally and was approaching the lifetime collections of Pushpa 2: The Rise, which would have made it the highest-grossing Indian film of all time. Its India gross of over 930 crore rupees in 15 days placed it ahead of the lifetime India collections of KGF Chapter 2, RRR, and Kalki 2898 AD.
These numbers are not separate from the social media conversation. They are the material ground on which the conversation stood. When Rajinikanth called Aditya Dhar box office ka baap, he was describing a fact. When the viral tweet noted that India’s biggest film was not being celebrated by India’s most prominent film figures, the contrast between the achievement and the acknowledgment was made vivid by the scale of what was being ignored.
The conversation about the Dhurandhar franchise was a conversation about quality and about ambition and about industry dynamics and about politics. But underneath all of those conversations was a simpler fact: tens of millions of people across India and around the world had walked into a cinema and paid to see something, had stayed for nearly four hours in some cases, had returned for second and third viewings, and had emerged wanting to tell everyone they knew that what they had seen was exceptional. That fact is what gave all the other conversations their energy, their stakes, and their meaning.
The social media record preserved here is a record of what that fact looked like when it moved through the specific network of Indian cinema’s celebrity culture, its critical culture, its political culture, and its audience culture. It is, in the end, a record of people trying to say something true about a film that moved them, and of other people conspicuously declining to do the same thing. Both groups, in their own way, are part of the story.
The conversation continues.
