Saif Ali Khan says Dhurandhar changed Bollywood

Saif Ali Khan has made a sweeping claim about the impact of the Dhurandhar franchise on Indian cinema, describing its success as a turning point that has fundamentally divided Bollywood into two distinct eras.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter India, Khan did not hold back in his assessment. “I see a time before Dhurandhar and a time after,” he said. “It’s up to us whether we catch up or not and wake up or not.” The statement positions the spy franchise not merely as a commercial success story but as a benchmark that the rest of the industry needs to measure itself against.
His remarks carry weight given the franchise’s extraordinary performance at the box office. The original Dhurandhar, released in December 2025, and its sequel Dhurandhar: The Revenge, which premiered in March 2026, together earned more than Rs 3,100 crore worldwide combined. The second installment alone contributed nearly half of Bollywood’s domestic box office revenue during the first half of 2026, a statistic that makes the scale of its impact almost impossible to overstate.
Khan’s central point was about the gap between the kind of films audiences are responding to and the kind of films the industry has been making. He asked directly why the commercial gap between Dhurandhar and other releases was so large, framing the question not as criticism but as a challenge to filmmakers who have continued to rely on familiar templates rather than evolving with changing audience expectations.
He also highlighted a specific aspect of the franchise’s craft that he felt set it apart. He praised the use of music in Dhurandhar, singling out the song Shararat for the way it was integrated into the narrative through a wedding sequence rather than functioning as a standalone item number. For Khan, this kind of organic storytelling represents the direction in which commercial Bollywood cinema needs to move.
The Dhurandhar franchise stars Ranveer Singh and has become one of the defining blockbusters of recent Indian cinema. Its success has sparked considerable conversation within the industry about production values, storytelling ambition and the kind of content that contemporary audiences are willing to turn out for in large numbers.
Saif Ali Khan was most recently seen in Netflix’s Kartavya. His upcoming projects include Hum Hindustani and Haiwaan, directed by Priyadarshan, in which he reunites with Akshay Kumar for the first time in nearly two decades. For an actor who has been a part of the industry long enough to witness multiple cycles of change, his observation about Dhurandhar’s impact reflects a genuine reading of where Bollywood currently stands and where it needs to go.