Akshay Kumar is returning to comedy, Sunny Deol is back on the Border battlefield, Ajay Devgn is donning the police uniform again, and Emraan Hashmi is trying to re-enter his anti-hero era. And the box office is doing better than it did when they tried to do something different. These are the genres they know—a calculated comfort, a cup of tea.
For decades, Kumar was the Khiladi of Bollywood. He brought tricks and action sequences that many stars would use stunt doubles for. From copying Tom Cruise’s aeroplane scene in Khiladi 420 (2000) to taking inspiration from Jackie Chan’s fight scenes in films such as Main Khiladi Tu Anari (1994), Brothers (2015) and Chandni Chowk to China (2009), Kumar was constantly reinventing himself through action.
The Khiladi series ran from 1992 to 2012, and almost every film came with a new action set piece. And then it stopped. The audience found a new side of the actor: the comedian.
There are memes galore with Kumar’s face on them, and countless scenes from his films have arrived on our feeds as funny reels. His work with Priyadarshan filled an entire decade with jokes that continue to live on the internet.
That, too, stopped in the next decade. Kumar pivoted to patriotic films. After a while, these stopped bearing the box office fruit. Then came the realisation: the handful of comedy films he continued to do were still somewhat working.
The most recent example is Welcome to the Jungle. The film collected nearly Rs 192 crore worldwide against a budget of Rs 125 crore. One may argue that it does not have the charm of the earlier Welcome films, but it has something that matters even more to the industry right now—money.
Perhaps that is what the return to comfort genres is really about. After spending years trying to reinvent themselves, Bollywood’s ageing stars are discovering that audiences may not necessarily want a new version of them. They want the version they already know and love.
Ajay Devgn is the driving force of India’s cop movie universe. He was once an action-romance hero, fighting against society and even the police. Phool Aur Kaante (1991) established him as an action star with the famous split stunt on two motorcycles.
Films such as Jigar (1992), Dilwale (1994), and Suhaag (1994) featured him as a man fighting for his love and against society. That image did not survive the changing wave of Bollywood and the box office.
Then he moved to comedy with Golmaal and Dhamaal. But what he is remembered for, and what has worked at the box office, are the Singham, Raid, and Drishyam franchises. His career has slowly become a sequel factory: if a film worked once, the same character and formula can return again.
Now he is the avatar of a military officer in Chauhan. Audiences have loved seeing Devgn as a government employee with authority. This time, it is mixed with the old action-man personality that made him a star.
The soldier and the anti-hero
Sunny Deol is Bollywood’s soldier at the border—that is how he is remembered.
The audience first started loving him through films based around India-Pakistan tensions. It all started with the iconic Border (1997), followed by Gadar: Ek Prem Katha (2001), Indian (2001), Maa Tujhhe Salaam (2002) and the spy love story The Hero: Love Story of a Spy (2003). These films established him as the angry soldier who will cross the border and win, no matter what.
He revisited his comfort genre with sequels Gadar 2 (2023), Border 2 (2026), and now, with the upcoming Batwara 1947. They have done a decent job at the box office. But if we go back to “tareekh pe tareekh” from Damini (1993), the angry lawyer phase, and films such as Ghatak (1996), we see another side of Deol that he is now revisiting with the web series Ikka, wearing the lawyer’s coat again.
Deol did several mediocre films in the interim, including Jaal: The Trap (2003), Teesri Aankh: The Hidden Camera (2006), Naksha (2006), Poster Boys (2017), and Chup: Revenge of the Artist (2022). No one really remembers these films.
Meanwhile, Emraan Hashmi created his own genre. He was often an anti-hero, known more for the songs than his performance or movies. Then came his horror films, the Raaz and Murder series of films. He was, and still is, remembered as Bollywood’s “serial kisser”.
Hashmi is donning his grey character for Awarapan 2 (2026) now. He tried to enter other genres, but the long list of those failed movies goes to show that the experiment always failed. He also returns to horror in 2027 with Rooh.
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(Edited by Prasanna Bachchhav)