Screen + Sound + Stage
Text by Aalika Mahindra
When Netflix entered India in January 2016, a voracious market with spiking mobile and internet connectivity awaited. Though the blockbuster release of Dangal, the highest-grossing Indian film of all time, capped off that same year, audiences preferred to binge-watch TV shows on the still-novel OTT platform. And when the media giant reached critical mass around 2018, no data analyst, no 10-year plan could have foreseen its dominant role in shaping the current shared culture of being “alone together”.
Eventually, thanks to an influx of available titles, views on streaming providers skewed toward films. Flash forward to the present, where movie theatres exist merely as spectral holdovers from the way we were, and Hindi cinema (or Bollywood if we want to be controversially specific) is taking…