Cinema is dead. Long live the spreadsheet.

Abhishek Bachchan, a man who grew up in the literal shadow of cinematic legend, just handed us the modern industry’s obituary. He didn’t mean to, of course. He thought he was being supportive. Speaking on Ranveer Singh’s upcoming maximalist fever dream, Dhurandhar, Bachchan Jr. didn’t talk about the craft, the lighting, or the emotional resonance of the performance. He told us to look at the numbers.

It’s the kind of quote that makes you want to check your pulse to see if you’ve been replaced by a logic board. "Look at the numbers," he said, claiming the film could outshine anything else on the market. It’s a McKinsey consultant’s idea of a rave review.

We’ve reached the point where the actors themselves have stopped pretending that movies are art. They’re units. They’re data points in a quarterly earnings call. When Bachchan tells us Dhurandhar is going to be a titan because of its "math," he’s admitting that the industry has finally completed its pivot to pure, unadulterated optimization.

Ranveer Singh is, by all accounts, a human spark plug. He’s the guy you hire when you need enough kinetic energy to power a small city. But in the context of Dhurandhar—a project with a rumored price tag north of ₹250 crore—Singh isn’t an artist. He’s a hedge. He’s the high-variance asset meant to guarantee a massive opening weekend so the producers can pay off the predatory interest rates on their production loans.

The friction here isn't about whether the movie is "good." "Good" is a legacy metric. The real friction lies in the trade-off between the spectacle and the soul. To get those "numbers" Bachchan is so fond of, you have to strip away anything that might alienate a single demographic. You end up with a polished, hyper-saturated sludge that plays as well in a Tier-3 town as it does in a suburban multiplex. It’s cinema as a pressurized steamroller.

This obsession with the box office isn't new, but the bluntness of it is getting exhausting. We used to have the decency to lie to each other. We used to pretend that a film mattered because it said something about the human condition. Now, the lead actors are essentially acting as PR reps for the accounting department.

Bachchan’s insistence on the "numbers" suggests that the quality of Dhurandhar is secondary to its velocity. If it makes ₹500 crore, it’s a masterpiece. If it makes ₹50 crore, it’s a failure. There is no middle ground. There is no "cult classic" in an era where the marketing budget alone costs more than the GDP of a Caribbean island. The pressure to perform has become so immense that the creative process is now just a series of risk-mitigation exercises.

You can see it in the way these films are built. They aren't written; they’re engineered. You need the item song for the YouTube views. You need the hyper-violent interval block for the Instagram reels. You need Ranveer Singh to do something "outrageous" during the press tour to trigger the engagement algorithms. It’s a feedback loop that feeds on itself until there’s nothing left but noise.

The industry is currently obsessed with the "Pan-India" hit, a term that basically means "something so loud you can't ignore it." Dhurandhar is clearly aiming for that throne. But when the numbers become the only story, the audience starts to feel like customers rather than viewers. We’re being asked to applaud the gross, not the grace.

If Dhurandhar does outshine every other film this year, it won’t be because it broke our hearts or opened our minds. It’ll be because it had the most efficient distribution nodes and the loudest social media campaign. It’ll be because the math worked.

But that’s the problem with basing your praise on a spreadsheet. Eventually, the formula gets leaked. The audience figures out they’re being played. And when the numbers finally stop adding up, what exactly is left on the screen?

If we’re only supposed to "look at the numbers," why bother turning the lights down at all?