There’s a pattern in how Bollywood films get released in the UK.
If the film and the cast is big, the assumption is that the audience will show up because the name is enough and there’s a loyal community.
And often, it works. Just enough to call it a success.
Dhurandhar is a good example of a bigger question worth asking – and not just about this film, but about every major South Asian release that lands in this part of the world.
What would its promotional campaign look like if it matched the ambition of the film?
Because here’s what I know from working in this space: the South Asian audience in the UK is not one-dimensional. It never was.
A British-Pakistani family in Bradford, a Tamil household in Wembley, a second-generation Gujarati in Leicester – these are not the same brief. They share heritage, broadly, but they don’t share the same reason to buy a ticket on a Friday night.
The instinct to market to all of them as one audience is understandable because its simpler, but I think it’s also where most campaigns lose the sharpest version of themselves.
The most interesting thing about Dhurandhar, and the most underused, is its intergenerational pull.
This is a film that a diaspora father and his British-born son could sit in together and find completely different things to love. One sees a story rooted in a cultural world he knows. The other sees a spectacle built for a global audience that includes him.
And if you understand that tension and that dual belonging – it is an entire campaign concept and the brief writes itself.
But here’s where I want to push the thinking even further.
Dhurandhar is already a crowd-puller. There’s no doubt about that.
The question is, what if the marketing was engineered to make it culturally significant? Not simply as a film people went to see, but a world people were living, eating, breathing before they even bought the ticket.
A film with this scale, this star power, this audience – it has everything it needs to set a new benchmark for how Indian cinema shows up in the UK. Not just commercially, but culturally.
That level of ambition doesn’t necessarily require a bigger budget. I think it need an ambitious brief waiting to be written.