Alia Bhatt is at the 79th Cannes Film Festival, and she didn’t come just to walk the red carpet. In a conversation with The Hollywood Reporter India, the actress and producer put a direct question to Indian cinema: why are we still making films with only one gender in mind?
Pointing to what’s happening globally, Alia noted that the last few years have seen women-centric films, think ‘Barbie’, and the much-anticipated ‘Devil Wears Prada’ sequel, doing phenomenal business at the international box office, with female audiences driving those numbers in a major way.
The 75% problem
At the heart of Alia’s argument is a statistic that gets thrown around a lot in Bollywood circles, the claim that roughly 75% of India’s movie-going audience is male. She acknowledged that this number exists and that it shapes how the industry thinks about what to greenlight and how to market it.
The result is a default tendency to chase the so-called “mass” audience, which in practice often means designing films almost entirely around male taste and male protagonists.
But Alia pushed back on what that logic actually costs. If films are built only with men in mind, she asked, what happens to the women in the audience? Where do they fit in?
Not anti-men but pro-storytelling
She was careful to clarify her position. This is not about shutting men out or swinging the pendulum entirely the other way. Alia made clear she isn’t suggesting anyone alienate male viewers.
Her answer is what she called “gender-agnostic” filmmaking, movies where the story is the star, not the gender of whoever’s leading it. Whether a film has a man or a woman at its centre should be irrelevant, she said. What should matter is the storytelling. Full stop.
The contrast closer to home
The irony that hovers over all of this is hard to ignore. While Alia Bhatt raises these questions at one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, her husband Ranbir Kapoor’s last major release was ‘Animal’, Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s polarising, testosterone-soaked blockbuster that became a massive box office phenomenon.
The film was everything Alia seems to be arguing against: unapologetically built for and around male fantasy, generating fierce debate about exactly the kind of gendered filmmaking she is now questioning on a global stage.