Anurag Kashyap is one of those filmmakers who doesn’t shy away from expressing what he thinks. In a recent interview, he called out the concept of “pan-Indian films,” labelling it a scam and a mere gimmick to raise budgets.
Kashyap clarified that a film can only be considered pan-Indian after its release, once it does significant business across the country, not before.
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When we look at films like Baahubali, Pushpa 2, or KGF, which pull massive crowds and shatter box office records, they naturally create a trend. Other filmmakers then attempt to replicate their style, scale, and grandeur.
The problem arises when films trying to be the next Pushpa or KGF label themselves as pan-Indian even before their release. This kind of reverse engineering, Kashyap argues, is disingenuous and often a way to inflate both the budget and the fees involved.
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Kashyap directly calls it a scam, especially when these self-proclaimed pan-Indian films go into production for 3–4 years, involving hundreds of people who become dependent on the project.
Not all the money goes into the actual filmmaking process. And the portion that does, often gets spent on unnecessarily massive, high-budget and unreal sets.
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He points out that in most cases, only about 1% of these big-budget films actually work, and they do so precisely because they ride in with zero expectations.
When people saw the success of Stree, they rushed to make horror comedies. When Uri worked, everyone wanted to make nationalist films. And now, after Pushpa 2, many want to recreate that formula.
This is where storytelling starts to decline- when filmmakers focus more on scale than substance.
It’s not that big budgets don’t help filmmaking, but there needs to be a solid story that justifies that budget. Otherwise, it’s just a way to extract money under the self-proclaimed “pan-Indian” label, money that often ends up in the wrong pockets.
