The set has stopped being fun: what two Indian cinema rows reveal about the industry in 2026
On 5 June 2026, two stories from the Indian film industry landed within hours of each other and, taken together, sketched something larger than either item alone. Anil Kapoor, a Hindi cinema institution whose career now spans close to five decades, told The Indian Express that the joy of being on a film set has been "completely sucked out." Hours later, news surfaced that Buchi Babu Sana, the director of the Telugu-language film Peddi, was on the defensive after the film's treatment of its lead actress Janhvi Kapoor drew sustained online backlash.
The two stories are not the same story. One is an actor reflecting on what the work has become; the other is a director defending a creative choice against a pile-on. Read together, however, they point to an industry whose internal temperature is rising — between generations of practitioners, between filmmakers and the audiences they are supposed to be making films for, and between the on-set culture that sustains craft and the algorithmically amplified public square that now surrounds it.
A veteran surveys the work
Anil Kapoor's remarks, as reported by The Indian Express, return to a theme that has surfaced repeatedly in his recent public comments: the gap between cinema as a craft and cinema as a process. Kapoor did not, in the excerpts available, break down which specific developments he is objecting to — the long hours of streaming-era production, the promotional machinery that now sits on top of every release, the social-media surveillance of cast and crew, or the bureaucratic layers between a script and a shooting schedule. The complaint's vagueness is itself the point. When a senior practitioner says the joy is gone, he is registering an accumulation, not a single decision.
This matters because Kapoor is not a marginal figure complaining from the wings. He is a Hindi cinema institution whose career has outlasted most of his peers and several business models of the industry itself. He began acting in the late 1970s, came into his own during the post-liberalisation boom of the 1990s, and has continued to work through the multiplex era, the OTT pivot, and the present streaming-and-theatrical hybrid that few in the industry have fully figured out. His interviews over the past two years have increasingly carried the cadence of a craftsman surveying a job site that has changed faster than the rules governing it.
The structural read: Indian film production has, over the past decade, become more corporatised. Studios, production houses, and streaming platforms have layered management structures, marketing obligations, and contractual demands that did not exist when a young Kapoor was making his name. The set is no longer a craftsman's guild; it is a logistical node inside a multi-platform release. The hours are longer, the cast is larger, the marketing cycle starts before the first day of principal photography, and the project is, in many cases, an asset on a balance sheet before it is a film.
An audience that organises itself
The Peddi controversy is, on its face, a different kind of story. According to The Indian Express, director Buchi Babu Sana has publicly addressed the "intense backlash" against the film's treatment of its lead actress Janhvi Kapoor — backlash that has reportedly surfaced across social-media platforms and fan accounts. The reporting does not itemise the offending scenes, but the direction of the criticism is clear: a section of the film's audience believes the film either misrepresented, undervalued, or otherwise failed an actress whose casting in a Telugu-language project was itself a marker of cross-industry mobility.
That casting is part of the story. Janhvi Kapoor is a Hindi-film actress working in a Telugu project, and the reception of a non-Telugu actress in a Telugu film has been a recurring site of friction in South Indian cinema for years. The Indian film industry has long been several industries in one — Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Hindi, Bengali, and the rest — and the mobility of talent between them has been uneven. When a non-Telugu actress takes a prominent Telugu role, fan loyalty and linguistic-cultural identification can become a third character in the production. Whatever the merits of the specific scenes in Peddi, the backlash did not come out of nowhere.
The structural read: the backlash is itself a feature of the industry Kapoor is mourning. Where once an audience that disliked a film simply stopped buying tickets, the contemporary version of that dissent is performative, networked, and visible to the principals in real time. Directors now respond to fan criticism not via box-office returns but via statements, clarifications, and sometimes changes to marketing materials. The feedback loop has tightened to the point where a single scene can prompt a public statement from the director. This is not unique to Telugu cinema. The Indian film industry in 2026 operates in an attention economy in which a film's reception is, from day one of release, an actively managed reputational problem. Buchi Babu's response is the contemporary version of a director's press tour; the difference is that the press conference is now a thread, a tweet, a fan-cam.
The shape underneath
The two stories share a common form: a practitioner at or near the top of his craft reflecting on the conditions of his work, and a practitioner mid-career defending a choice against an audience that has organised itself into something that looks, behaves, and pressures like a stakeholder group.
What the incidents illuminate, taken together, is an industry in which the old contract — between filmmaker and audience, between actor and production, between the work and the work's reception — is being renegotiated in public, in real time, and without a settled set of norms. The set has stopped being a guild hall. The audience has stopped being a customer. Both are now participants in a process whose rules are still being written, and neither side is entirely happy with the new arrangement.
Stakes
If the trajectory continues, three things will follow. First, the on-set culture Kapoor describes will lose more of its remaining craft veterans to early retirement, to selective project-picking, or to the streaming-and-theatrical grind that demands longer hours per project and a heavier promotional load per release. Second, the feedback cycle that has produced the Peddi backlash will harden into a norm in which directors pre-emptively calibrate films to anticipated fan response — a soft form of audience capture in which the film's content is shaped less by the story the director wants to tell than by the social-media reaction the director is trying to forestall. Third, and most consequentially, the Indian film industry will continue to lose the distinction between a film and the discourse around it, with promotional infrastructure increasingly shaped by what audiences say about a film rather than what the film itself does on screen.
The counter-read: not every veteran reflection on craft is a referendum on the industry. Kapoor's remarks are one interview. The Peddi backlash is one project. Both may pass without leaving much trace. The case for treating them as a pattern is suggestive rather than dispositive, and the publication of two such items in the same news cycle could itself be coincidence amplified by the wire services.
What remains uncertain is whether the industry has the institutional capacity to address either issue. The trade bodies that govern Indian cinema are not, by most accounts, equipped to negotiate on-set working conditions in the way that Western guilds have. The audience, having organised itself into stakeholder form, shows few signs of accepting any back-channel through which its voice could be moderated. Both sides of the contract are now operating in the open, in public, in the same panicked airspace. That is the change Kapoor is mourning. That is the change Peddi is being made inside.
Monexus covered these as two discrete items in the same week rather than merging them into a single "crisis" frame; the structural reading above is the publication's, not a paraphrase of either source.
Wire provenance
This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anil_Kapoor
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buchi_Babu_Sana