Dhulia Liked Dhurandhar Then Called Its Plot Empty

Tigmanshu Dhulia said he liked the first Dhurandhar, then asked if a spy who goes to Pakistan and wreaks havoc is a story. The National Award-winning filmmaker was answering questions at the Rajendra Mathur Memorial Lecture in 2026, a session the Editors Guild of India posted on X with a full video. He grouped Aditya Dhar’s Ranveer Singh film with Pushpa and KGF as one corporate mould, a fictional biopic with one template.

The Editors Guild clip itself keeps a line the dunks dropped. Dhulia called Dhurandhar “a very engaging and entertaining film.” The quarrel is not that he missed the hit. It is that he would not call that hit a story.

Praise for the Music, Then a Plot Test

He did not open with a pan. He opened with craft, then applied a memory test the box office never uses.

If I ask you to tell me the story of Dhurandhar, I liked that film by the way, the first part. Very well presented, very engaging, good use of music. But if you ask someone to tell you its story, you won’t be able to tell the story of Dhurandhar. There is a man, he is a cover spy, he goes to Pakistan and wreaks havoc there. Is that a story? Stories have disappeared from films.

Tigmanshu Dhulia, filmmaker, Rajendra Mathur Memorial Lecture 2026

The Guild’s YouTube upload of the Q&A is the cleanest record of how he actually spoke, praise included.

He went further than one title. “For one, the people who tell stories have disappeared, and those who want to tell them are not allowed to make them,” he said. “They are not allowed to tell those stories because they think, ‘This story won’t work.’ There is only one template.”

That is a financing complaint wearing a plot complaint. Dhar’s film is the example because it is the example that printed money.

What Dhurandhar Puts On Screen

Dhar wrote and directed the film for Jio Studios and B62 Studios, with Jyoti Deshpande and Lokesh Dhar producing. It opened on 5 December 2025 at 214 minutes, with an A certificate from the CBFC. Principal photography ran from July 2024 to October 2025 in Punjab, Maharashtra, Chandigarh, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh and Thailand. A project planned as one film was split in two and shot together.

The plot is not “a guy.” It starts on 30 December 1999, with a minister and an Intelligence Bureau chief paying a US$10 million ransom after a Kandahar hijack, then authorising Operation Dhurandhar after the 2001 Parliament attack. Ranveer Singh’s Hamza Ali Mazari crosses at Torkham in 2004, works a Lyari juice shop, and is revealed as Jaskirat Singh Rangi, a death-row inmate sent in by R. Madhavan’s Ajay Sanyal.

THE STORY HE CUT TO ONE LINE

• The cover: Hamza joins Rehman Dakait’s Baloch gang in Karachi after saving the don’s younger son at a wedding ambush.
• The politics: Rehman is nudged toward office by ISI officer Major Iqbal, played by Arjun Rampal, and by the Khanani money network.
• The failure: Hamza still cannot stop the 26/11 Mumbai attack, which the film stages as the wound that turns the mission.
• The trap: He marries Yalina Jamali, betrays Rehman on a weapons run, and takes Lyari so he can hunt “Bade Sahab.”

Akshaye Khanna’s Rehman, Sanjay Dutt’s SP Chaudhary Aslam, and a gallery of named hijackers and LeT planners sit inside that spine. Critics split on the runtime and on the mix of fiction with IC-814, the Parliament attack, Operation Lyari and 26/11. Some called it propaganda. The CBFC still let a three-hour-34-minute A film into theatres, and audiences stayed.

Dhulia’s one-liner is a fair jab at the shape. It is a poor account of the hours. A rise-through-violence outsider tale with a patriotic payload is still a tale, even when you can hum it after two other southern hits.

A ₹3,019 Crore Franchise Built on That Template

Sacnilk’s 12 April 2026 tracker put the duology at ₹3,019.35 crore worldwide, the first Indian series past ₹3,000 crore. Dhurandhar: The Revenge opened on 19 March 2026, 104 days after the first film, and became the first title to cross ₹1,000 crore net in a single language in India.

THE DHURANDHAR DUOLOGY, 12 APRIL 2026

On that dated ledger the duology sat ₹581.35 crore ahead of Baahubali and ₹927.15 crore ahead of Pushpa. It was also the only Indian series with two films inside the ₹1,000 crore club. Gulf states blocked the theatrical release. Jio Studios still called the first film India’s biggest Hindi title in a 7 January 2026 post, while the run was live.

The theatrical total was not the last screen. JioStar said the world television premiere on Star Gold, Star Gold 2 and Colors Cineplex reached 53 million viewers on television on 15 June 2026, the highest such premiere reach in five years, and 1.4 times the film’s three-month cinema footfall in about four hours. Alok Jain, who heads Hindi and English entertainment at JioStar, called that “the enduring power of great storytelling.” Dhulia, using a narrower word, said the stories are finished.

Pushpa, KGF and the Fictional Biopic

His real target was the factory that now feeds those numbers. He did not say Dhar copied a scene. He said the industry copies a life-shape: an outsider climbs a crime ladder, the camera loves the climb, and the biopic label gets stretched until it fits a fiction.

Because it is a corporate culture, the same kind of films are being made. Every film is a biopic, a fictional biopic. Every film, you can watch Pushpa, you can watch KGF, Dhurandhar. I am talking about commercial mainstream cinema.

Tigmanshu Dhulia, filmmaker, Rajendra Mathur Memorial Lecture 2026

Pushpa is a red-sandalwood climber. KGF is a gold-mine climber. Dhurandhar is a death-row climber planted inside Lyari. The costumes change. The graph does not. That is a usable observation even if you think the Lyari graph is better written than he allowed.

He tied the sameness to money and to politics in the same breath. “This happens during extreme capitalism, people also start looking like each other,” he said. “You see the fashion these days, everybody looks the same. They all have the same haircut. Even cities are looking identical to each other. The unique character of every city is finished. My city Allahabad, (named has been changed to Prayagraj) was known for so many different things but now it looks like any other city, same malls, same cars. This type of political system finishes your individuality.”

Born on 3 July 1967 in Allahabad, he has spent a career filming men who do not live in those malls. The city line is the tell. He is not only bored by a spy movie. He is bored by a country that wants one haircut.

Paan Singh Tomar Earned a National Award and ₹14.61 Crore

The jealousy charge writes itself if you only read India net. Box Office India still lists Paan Singh Tomar, his 2 March 2012 athlete-turned-dacoit film, at ₹14.61 crore India net and a Semi Hit. It won the National Film Award for Best Feature Film in 2012. Irrfan Khan’s runner is the title people use when they want to say Dhulia once made a story.

His bigger theatrical numbers did not land as hits.

TIGMANSHU DHULIA AS DIRECTOR, INDIA NET

Bullet Raja remains his highest India net as a director, and the ledger still marks it a Flop. Milan Talkies closed at ₹0.33 crore. He is also the actor who played Ramadhir Singh in Anurag Kashyap’s Gangs of Wasseypur, a crime film that found a longer life than most of the titles he signed himself. None of that India-net list is a ₹840.20 crore first film, let alone a ₹1,083.65 crore sequel.

So the arithmetic behind “sour grapes” is sitting in public. It does not decide whether a 214-minute spy film has a story. It only decides who is allowed to say it out loud without being recoded as a failed producer.

Sour Grapes Is the Easy Reply

Posts on X reached for the shortest available insult. “Sour grapes.” “Peak jealousy.” “Another bitter, self-proclaimed taste merchant has crawled out of his cocoon.” A longer strain treated the remark as proof that a “Bollywood gang” was still seething because an Indian spy is shown breaking Pakistani networks. The loudest reply was not a reconstruction of the Lyari plot. It was a loyalty test.

That conversion is the point he was making, whether or not he wanted this week’s evidence. A craft distinction (good music, thin story) cannot survive contact with a ₹3,019.35 crore brand if the audience has been trained to hear only two verdicts, patriot or traitor, hit or flop. In December 2025 the Film Critics Guild had already condemned threats, review-tampering and organised abuse aimed at writers who filed mixed notices on the first film. Nine months later a National Award director gets the same flattening, with jokes instead of threats.

He is not innocent of flattening either. “A cover spy goes to Pakistan and wreaks havoc” erases the death-row recruitment, the juice-shop year, the wedding ambush, the failed warning before 26/11, and the marriage that doubles as a hit. You can hold both facts: the film has more plot than his joke, and the plot still belongs to a family of climber-epics he named out loud.

Ghamasaan Goes to ZEE5 on September 11

His next film as director does not go to the multiplex chain that ate Dhurandhar. Ghamasaan arrives on ZEE5 on 11 September 2026, three days after the Guild clip moved. Pratik Gandhi plays an IPS officer chasing Arshad Warsi’s dacoit Maharaj. Dhulia has said he is approached only for dacoits and cops, that he finds urban love stories boring, and that he does not like “hyper-dramatic films with loud background music, blood and butchery.”

He also said he does not believe the attention-span panic. People still watch cricket for hours, he argued, and a three-hour film still works “if you make a good film.” Dhar made a 214-minute film and people watched it in theatres, on Netflix, and in 53 million television homes. The market Dhulia calls a template factory already answered his own test on length. It has not answered his test on sameness.

On 11 September the man who asked whether Dhurandhar is a story puts a dacoit film on a streaming app. The franchise he used as a punchline has already done ₹3,019.35 crore, and it does not need him to recap the plot.