For the Indian film industry, 2025 felt like a return to familiar ground.

The year before that, women-led stories had briefly reshaped India’s global cinematic image, bringing accolades and new attention. But last year, Bollywood’s violent, male-driven action thrillers dominated the domestic box-office and cultural conversations.

In the last weeks of 2025, Indian social media was swamped with discussions about a single juggernaut: Dhurandhar, an espionage thriller set in the backdrop of India-Pakistan tensions.

Packed with graphic violence and gangland politics, the film became the defining hit of the year, cementing its place in a crop of aggressive, hypermasculine films that drove popular discourse.

The trend was a stark contrast to 2024, when a number of films made by women – Payal Kapadia’s All We Imagine As Light, Shuchi Talati’s Girls Will Be Girls and Kiran Rao’s Laapataa Ladies – got global attention and praise.

“What 2024 established was that Indian women filmmakers are not marginal voices, but leading global ones,” says film critic Mayank Shekhar, calling it “a moment of truth” rather than a trend.

The hope was that richer, more textured stories about women would grow both in number and popularity. Instead, in 2025 the top 10 box-office hits – five of them from Bollywood, a small relief for a Hindi film industry still struggling to regain its footing after the pandemic – were dominated by larger-than-life, hypermasculine heroes, from the historical epic Chhaava to the action spectacle War 2. The only film on the list led by a woman was an outlier: the Malayalam-language superhero film Lokah.

It wasn’t just action thrillers that put men at the centre. Blockbuster romance Saiyaara followed a troubled male rockstar who ultimately “rescues” his partner who is struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. Even mythical spectacles such as Kantara: Chapter 1 (Kannada) and Mahavatar Narsimha (dubbed into several languages) doubled down on traditional male heroism.

The year’s most talked-about films were dominated by images of men performing pain, power and vengeance at full volume.

Out of the top 10, one of the year’s most debated hits was Tere Ishk Mein, which features an angry, volatile male protagonist and a high-achieving woman whose ambitions are eclipsed by his obsessive love. Despite criticism for romanticising toxic masculinity, the film became actor Dhanush’s highest-grossing Hindi release, earning more than 1,550m rupees ($17.26m, £12.77m) worldwide.

Another surprise hit was Ek Deewane Ki Deewaniyat, a relatively small-budget romance drama with a hero who, as a review put it, is “an obsessive lover who refuses to take no for an answer”.

2024 offered “a glimpse of what’s possible”, says Priyanka Basu, a senior lecturer in Performing Arts at King’s College London.

She points out that Hindi cinema has historically marginalised women protagonists, adding that the male-centred industry has long had stark inequalities in casting, pay and opportunities.

“Just one year to change that is unrealistic. We need more such years, and more stories that put women front and centre,” she says.

Indian cinema’s, and especially Bollywood’s, fixation with the macho hero goes back to Amitabh Bachchan’s “angry young man” image of the 1970s.

Even the romantic era of superstars like Shah Rukh Khan offered only a brief detour – one he has since abandoned in favour of action-heavy blockbusters such as Pathaan and Jawan.

The trend has carried onto streaming platforms as well – once seen as alternative spaces where women-centric storytelling could succeed.

A recent report by media research company Ormax analysing 338 Hindi shows on streaming platforms showed that action and crime thrillers, mostly male-led, now make up 43% of the titles; female-led stories have fallen from 31% in 2022 to just 12% in 2025.

“At some point, OTT (over-the-top, or streaming) platforms began chasing box-office logic,” Mr Shekhar says. “Streaming now mirrors theatrical trends instead of challenging them.”

Trade experts argue that the shift reflects audience demand rather than creative regression in the industry.

“Indian films have traditonally been male-led but we have also had female-centric classics like Mother India and Pakeezah,” says analyst Taran Adarsh.

The accusations of toxicity, he says, come from a “handful of critics” and can’t change the fate of films.

“At the end of the day, the only verdict that matters is that of the audience,” he adds.

But attributing everything to audience tastes is an oversimplification, argues Anu Singh Choudhary, co-writer of Delhi Crime 3, the third season of a Netflix thriller that highlighted the issue of women-trafficking through a feminist lens.

“Macho blockbusters have existed for long because they reflect a society that’s always been patriarchal and male-dominated. Will that change overnight? No. But as the world order changes, so will our films,” she says.

There’s also the economic reality. Producers, distributors and exhibitors control the number of screens, marketing and visibility any film gets – and that often depends on the bankability of the male star. Independent and women-led films face an uphill battle, particularly if they are not fronted by big stars.

Films nowadays are also going through a “period of performative, exaggerated misogyny”, says screenwriter Atika Chohan, whose work includes women-led films Chhapaak and Margarita With a Straw.

Some of this, she thinks, is a response to the accountability demanded by women during the MeToo movement of 2017-19.

While the movement exposed widespread abuse within the film industry, its impact was uneven. Some of the accused faced temporary setbacks, but most returned to work and structural power imbalances largely remain.

“As long as these [hypermasculine] films make money, they aren’t going anywhere,” Ms Chohan says.

But as always, there are signs of hope, mostly from smaller, regional film industries and independent filmmakers.

A new generation of independent filmmakers in India is making “riveting, viable cinema” instead of “mass entertainers,” Ms Choudhary points out.

Sharp indies such as Sabar Bonda and Songs of Forgotten Trees dug into complex social and political layers and told sensitive stories of relationships.

The Telugu film The Girlfriend told the story of a woman in a toxic relationship learning to free herself, while Bad Girl (Tamil) was hailed as a successful coming-of-age drama told through a woman’s lens.

In Malayalam cinema, Feminichi Fathima – with “Feminichi” a social-media distortion of “feminist” – used humour to follow a Muslim housewife’s quiet rebellion against patriarchy. On the streaming side, The Great Shamsuddin Family has been praised for capturing the everyday resilience and complexities of modern Muslim women.

“It’s a quieter movement, working from the margins,” says Ms Choudhary. “And it isn’t going to disappear.”