At the box office line and in living rooms, aditya dhar is the name attached to a new round of anticipation—and anxiety—as “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” arrives in theaters Thursday, including in the United States. For many viewers, the tension is not just about what happens next on screen, but what happens after: the arguments the film can ignite.
Why are audiences bracing for arguments over Aditya Dhar’s sequel?
“Dhurandhar” has already proven it can travel far beyond a typical hit. The first film—about an Indian spy working undercover in Pakistan—captivated audiences across rival South Asian nations for months, drew viewers worldwide, and became the highest-grossing Hindi-language film ever in both India and North America. Now its second installment, “Dhurandhar: The Revenge, ” is landing in a climate where the story’s themes can feel inseparable from the real world.
Directed by Aditya Dhar, the films arrive amid heightened tensions between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan—nuclear-armed neighbors that fought their worst conflict in decades over four days last May. The franchise also sits alongside other box-office hits with overt nationalist messaging that have emerged since India’s Hindu nationalist leader, Narendra Modi, took office in 2014, including “The Kashmir Files” and “The Kerala Story, ” as well as Dhar’s previous films “Uri: The Surgical Strike” and “Article 370. ”
That combination—commercial reach, political sensitivity, and a storyline rooted in espionage—helps explain why some fans are excited for the sequel while others anticipate heated debate the moment the credits roll.
What’s driving the scale of “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” opening?
The first film, released in December, became India’s highest-grossing film last year. It later topped the Netflix chart for non-English films after its Jan. 30 release on the platform—an achievement that included Pakistan, even as officials there criticized it as Indian propaganda and publicly banned it. Despite the ban, the film has been widely pirated in Pakistan.
That reach is now feeding the sequel’s rollout. “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” arrives Thursday in theaters with millions of dollars in presales in India, a sign that the audience is not simply returning—it is arriving early, with expectations already shaped by months of conversation, controversy, and repeat viewing.
The original film’s scale mattered, too. Running more than 3 1/2 hours, it offered a long, high-intensity experience: a star-studded cast, heart-pounding action scenes, and a catchy soundtrack that helped lodge it in popular culture beyond the movie hall.
What are the central controversies around “Dhurandhar” and its sequel?
One flashpoint has been geography and portrayal. Pakistani authorities said the film’s depiction of gang violence is unfair to Karachi’s working-class neighborhood of Lyari. After the film’s release, the Sindh government said it was backing what it described as a rebuttal film to “Dhurandhar, ” calling the blockbuster “Indian propaganda. ”, the government said: “Lyari stands for culture, peace, and resilience — not violence. ”
The film’s popularity, however, has spilled into public life in ways that can be hard to contain. Lawmaker Bilawal Bhutto Zardari—the son of assassinated former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto—was seen entering an event to one of the film’s trending songs in a video that went viral.
Another point of contention has been the way the story blends cinema with real-life events. “Dhurandhar” has been criticized over how it draws from attacks on India’s Parliament in 2001 and on the city of Mumbai in 2008. The opening scene references the 1999 hijacking of an Indian passenger plane by Pakistani terrorists, and introduces the fictional Indian intelligence chief Ajay Sanyal—believed to be modeled after Ajit Doval, India’s national security adviser and lead negotiator in the 1999 hijacking—who decides to send the protagonist on his mission as retribution.
In the sequel, the storyline continues immediately after the first film’s climax. Undercover Indian agent Jaskirat Singh Rangi (Ranveer Singh), now deeply embedded as Hamza Ali Mazari, rises to dominate Karachi’s Lyari underworld following the death of gang leader Rehman Dakait (Akshaye Khanna). The sequel’s plot includes gang wars, shifting alliances, corrupt officials, and escalating threats from SP Chaudhary Aslam (Sanjay Dutt) and ISI operative Major Iqbal (Arjun Rampal), described as the mastermind behind terror networks targeting India. As the mission deepens into Pakistan’s criminal-terror-political nexus, it blurs into a brutal personal vendetta, and the film confronts the psychological toll of living as a monster for one’s country.
Critical response has also focused on tone and form. One review described the sequel as a “loud, violent spectacle, ” arguing it attempts to outdo the original in volume and venom, and warning that it channels a mood of the moment when “the world is itching for war. ” The same review said Dhar’s style leans heavily on gratuitous violence, creating a world so relentlessly brutal that it can feel designed to desensitize audiences to stakes and push attention toward blood-curdling sequences.
How do the filmmakers defend their intent—and what solutions are on the table?
From inside the production, the defense rests on responsibility as much as ambition. Jyoti Deshpande, president of Mumbai-based Jio Studios and one of the producers of “Dhurandhar, ” framed the challenge as balancing inspiration from reality with the duty of storytelling: “When a story is inspired by real events and complex geopolitical realities, intent and responsibility must go hand in hand with cinematic ambition, ” she said in emailed comments.
Deshpande also said the filmmakers aimed for nuance: “Our approach was to present a more nuanced take on patriotism while at the same time remaining highly engaging through immersive storytelling that allowed viewers, regardless of geography, to be invested in the narrative. ”
On the other side of the border, the most direct institutional response described in the public record is the Sindh government’s stated support for a rebuttal film. That move signals a different kind of “solution”: answering a narrative with another narrative, and insisting that a place’s identity—Lyari’s “culture, peace, and resilience”—should not be overwritten by what officials view as a caricature.
Between these positions sits the audience, navigating a franchise that has become a cultural event, a political lightning rod, and—at least for some—a test of how much violence, length, and symbolism a blockbuster can carry.
What happens when the lights come up?
The first “Dhurandhar” built momentum from spectacle, music, and a hero’s undercover danger in Karachi, then expanded into controversy as viewers argued over realism, propaganda, and the ethics of weaving real-world tragedy into entertainment. Now, with “Dhurandhar: The Revenge” arriving Thursday, the familiar scene repeats: a line, a ticket scan, a darkened hall.
But this time, the audience walks in already divided—some chasing adrenaline, others bracing for a story they believe crosses a line, and many simply curious about what aditya dhar will do with the weight of a sequel that is not just a continuation, but a referendum.
When the film ends, the arguments may begin in the lobby, in the car, or at the kitchen table. The unresolved question is whether the conversation will widen into something more deliberate—about responsibility, representation, and what viewers demand from the biggest stories on screen—or whether it will harden into another round of shouting that the next blockbuster can easily exploit.
