Siddharth Roy Kapur, Kiran Rao, Sameer Nair, and Raj Nidimoru discuss the democratization of stardom and constraints of corporatized sources of funding in The Hollywood Reporter India’s roundtable on the IMDb report on 25 years of Indian Cinema
MUMBAI, India—November 04, 2025—IMDb (www.imdb.com), the world’s most popular and authoritative source for information on movies, TV shows, and celebrities, recently released a report, titled 25 Years of Indian Cinema (2000-2025), featuring a comprehensive analysis of the Indian film industry’s evolution over the past quarter century. Industry stalwarts Siddharth Roy Kapur, Kiran Rao, Sameer Nair, and Raj Nidimoru came together for a roundtable by The Hollywood Reporter India to discuss the trends captured in the report, in a session hosted by film critic and editor Anupama Chopra.
Democratization of Stardom
Discussing the changing nature of stardom, Kapur said, “Stardom has been democratized to a large extent. It’s not the preserve of only a few top superstars as it used to be in the past.”
Rao agreed and added, “I think what’s interesting is that it’s stopped being all cult of personality and it’s really become about the film itself and what this star is bringing to the film. So it’s really exciting that there’s so many more artists now that people are interested to watch and also when you think about it, you know the number of alternatives people have when it comes to consuming anything. The stars also include YouTube stars who are on many other platforms. So when you look at the number of followers of a film star or a model or somebody who is just a stand-up comic, it actually is not that different.”
Lack of Investment in building careers of Women Actors
Discussing the evolving nature of female stardom, Nidimoru said, “Most of the time, superstars are made from a love story. Their first film is a love story or a breakout love story. The hero and heroine both work. But the bets are put on the guy over time. It’s almost like he’s built like a franchise, right? There is a pipeline that he’s gone through and you’ve built him up and now he gets a lot of people into theaters. And then you put a girl’s name out there, a movie led by a female, and you don’t get that much from the box office. So for some reason we haven’t built them up over time and you can’t expect overnight to make a female-led film and let it open. So that I feel has been underexploited because at the end of it, it’s that one person you’re going to watch on screen that you love to watch. It shouldn’t matter what their gender is.”
Ascent of regional cinema
Kapur also spoke about the ascent of titles from the South and how their productions differ from Hindi films. He mentioned, “I think there’s something to be said for the ambition of the South films. And I think that also stems from the fact that a lot of their sources of funding are not corporatized sources of funding and therefore there is a certain level of a devil-may-care attitude when it comes to budgets. There’s definitely much more order, much more process, much more system that’s come in with the corporatization of cinema in Hindi cinema but I think what that might have led to, to a certain extent, is a lack of going for gold. Let’s just take a punt on this and just go all in. When you look at what S.S. Rajamouli says about the budget he started Baahubali: The Beginning with to what he ended with, I think that would be very very difficult to do in Hindi cinema today given the structured sources of funding right so ironically what’s helped them there in terms of being ambitious is some of the chaos when it comes to where they raise the money from.”
Nidimoru added, “When I was shooting Stree in Chanderi, the cook was watching a dubbed Telugu film and he said these are the only films we watch. So I realized the popularity with which they had spread everywhere, especially Telugu films. Now, the way I look at it is that it’s really no more the “North” and the “South” film industries anymore. I see it as one Indian film industry now.”
Need for Creative Social Responsibility
Touching upon giving a boost to creativity in the industry, Nair said, “I think the industry in general needs to have its own form of CSR called Creative Social responsibility, which means that for all the commercial stuff and for all the profiting that we all aspire to there should be that creative social responsibility, where all the stuff that’s being made must be must be put out there must be shared. It’s almost like saving the knowledge of the race.”
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