Hindi Cinema in the 2000s: Industry Status, Multiplexes, and the Khan Decade

01Defining films

Lagaan (2001), Ashutosh Gowariker's three-hour-and-forty-minute cricket-and-colonialism epic shot at Kunariya village near Bhuj over six months, was the decade's announcement film. Aamir Khan produced it through his then-fledgling Aamir Khan Productions, financed it largely against his star value, and turned the foreign-language Oscar nomination — the first for an Indian film since Salaam Bombay! in 1989 — into a national event. Karan Johar's Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001), with three Khans and a multi-generational Punjabi-NRI cast, became the highest-grossing Hindi film overseas at its release and is the textbook Dharma melodrama. Sanjay Leela Bhansali's Devdas (2002), the most expensive Indian film of its time, screened out of competition at Cannes; what survived the production maximalism was the Madhuri Dixit-Aishwarya Rai mujra Dola Re Dola, which is the only sequence in the film most viewers can still hum.

Farhan Akhtar's Dil Chahta Hai (2001) was the structural counter-event. Three Bombay friends, English-inflected dialogue, an unfussy A.R. Rahman-backed Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy score and a refusal of the song-and-dance form's usual obligations: the film opened a new lane that Zoya Akhtar, Reema Kagti and Dibakar Banerjee would extend across the next fifteen years. Rajkumar Hirani's Munna Bhai M.B.B.S. (2003), Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) and 3 Idiots (2009) built a humanist-comedy register that consistently outperformed at the box office. Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra's Rang De Basanti (2006) collapsed the gap between the colonial-revolutionary past and contemporary Indian student politics into a single text; the film became a reference point for the 2011 anti-corruption movement, which is the kind of afterlife most films do not earn. Imtiaz Ali's Jab We Met (2007) reset the romantic comedy on the strength of a Kareena Kapoor performance that the rest of her decade did not equal.

02The Khan economy at peak

The 2000s were the decade in which the three-Khan structure crystallised into something close to permanence. Shah Rukh Khan's run from K3G (2001) through Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Veer-Zaara (2004), Don (2006), Om Shanti Om (2007), Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi (2008) and My Name Is Khan (2010) established him as the dominant face of Hindi cinema's overseas market and the standard romantic-prestige lead. The performance reached its limit in Karan Johar's My Name Is Khan, in which Khan played a man with Asperger's syndrome navigating post-9/11 American suspicion; the role pushed against a star-text that had been built on the Raj-Simran register, with mixed results.

Aamir Khan's run from Lagaan (2001) through Mangal Pandey (2005), Rang De Basanti (2006), Fanaa (2006), Taare Zameen Par (2007), A.R. Murugadoss's Hindi remake Ghajini (2008) and 3 Idiots (2009) established the writer-led prestige model that would define his 2010s. Khan released roughly one film a year, prepared exhaustively, and maintained an unusual alignment between his star economy and his thematic agenda. Salman Khan spent the first half of the decade in genuine commercial decline through Tere Naam (2003) and Partner (2007). His career reset came at decade's end with Wanted (2009) — directed by the Tamil choreographer Prabhu Deva, a remake of Puri Jagannadh's Telugu Pokiri — which inaugurated the second-half-of-career mass-film phase that would define his 2010s through the Dabangg, Bodyguard, Ek Tha Tiger and Kick franchises.

03The multiplex revolution and the corporate studios

PVR's chain expansion through 2001-2008, the parallel build-out of INOX from 2002 onward, and Cinepolis's 2009 entry redrew Hindi cinema's urban exhibition. The structural fact was less the higher ticket prices than the multi-screen complex: a single multiplex could programme four or six titles simultaneously, which made it commercially viable to release a ₹3-crore film alongside a ₹40-crore one. The genuine mid-budget Hindi film returned as a category. Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006), Dibakar Banerjee's debut, made on roughly ₹3.5 crore and earning ₹15 crore; Bheja Fry (2007), Sagar Ballary's chamber comedy made for under ₹1 crore and earning over ₹10 crore; Neeraj Pandey's A Wednesday! (2008), a single-day political thriller — these films were industrial impossibilities a decade earlier.

Corporate studios reshaped the production financing. UTV Motion Pictures, founded in 1990 by Ronnie Screwvala and scaled through the 2000s, produced Swades, Rang De Basanti, Jodhaa Akbar and the Aamir Khan slate before its 2012 acquisition by Disney. Reliance Entertainment used its co-production deal with Steven Spielberg's DreamWorks to bring American studio practice into the Yash Raj-Dharma-dominated upper tier. Eros International built an overseas-distribution arm of its own. The decade ended with corporate financing displacing the older private-financier model across the upper budget tier and with insurance, completion bonds and bank credit becoming standard tools — a quiet revolution whose effects would only be visible after the 2008 global financial crisis tightened the cycle.

UTV Motion Pictures, founded in 1990 by Ronnie Screwvala and scaled through the 2000s, produced Swades, Rang De Basanti, Jodhaa Akbar and the Aamir Khan slate before its 2012 acquisition by Disney.

04Music: the post-Rahman generation

The 2000s soundtrack landscape was led by composer collectives that had formed in the late 1990s. Shankar-Ehsaan-Loy scored Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003), Lakshya (2004), Bunty Aur Babli (2005), Rock On!! (2008) and Wake Up Sid (2009), establishing a guitar-led, urban-aspirational sound that paired with the Mumbai-friendship film with unusual fluency. Vishal-Shekhar emerged with Jhankaar Beats (2003) and broke through with Om Shanti Om (2007), Bachna Ae Haseeno (2008) and Dostana (2008). Pritam, who would dominate the next decade, scored Dhoom (2004), Gangster (2006), Race (2008) and Love Aaj Kal (2009) — the latter two cited by music critics in subsequent years for plagiarism allegations that the composer largely settled or did not contest, an asymmetry that has become part of the Pritam critical biography.

A.R. Rahman continued through Lagaan (2001), Saathiya (2002), Swades (2004), Rang De Basanti (2006), Jaane Tu... Ya Jaane Na (2008), Ghajini (2008), Delhi-6 (2009) and Slumdog Millionaire (2008), for which he won two Academy Awards — Best Original Score and, with Gulzar's lyric, Best Original Song for Jai Ho. Rahman's Slumdog moment is the most over-cited and least useful entry in his catalogue; the more interesting work of his decade is Saathiya, with its layered Mumbai-suburban score, and Delhi-6, which neither commercial nor critical audiences absorbed at release. Amit Trivedi debuted with Rajeev Khandelwal's Aamir (2008) and broke through with Dev.D (2009), the soundtrack that announced the indie-music register that would define the 2010s.

05The indie groundwork: Black Friday, Dev.D, and the Anurag Kashyap school

Although the Hindi indie wave is conventionally dated to the 2010s, its institutional groundwork was laid in the 2000s, and the figure to track is Anurag Kashyap. His Paanch, completed in 2003 and cleared by the Censor Board with cuts but never given a theatrical release, established the writer-director template that the decade would absorb. Black Friday, his adaptation of S. Hussain Zaidi's reportage on the 1993 Bombay blasts, was completed in 2004 but held by the Bombay High Court pending the trial verdict; it was finally released in 2007 to the kind of festival-and-critic reception that the Hindi commercial press of the time had no working vocabulary for. Dev.D (2009), Kashyap's contemporary substance-abuse reimagining of the Saratchandra Chattopadhyay Devdas, was the breakthrough — a critical and commercial success that confirmed there was an audience for profane, location-shot Hindi cinema that owed nothing to the Yash Raj romantic template.

The Kashyap school, formally institutionalised through the founding of Phantom Films in 2011, had its informal centre in the second half of the 2000s. Vikramaditya Motwane was preparing Udaan, which would release in 2010. Anurag Basu was making Life in a... Metro (2007). Sudhir Mishra had made Hazaaron Khwaishein Aisi (2003), the Naxalite-era political romance that ran through several festivals before its delayed release. Dibakar Banerjee debuted with Khosla Ka Ghosla (2006) and confirmed his satirical voice with Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye! (2008). Onir's My Brother... Nikhil (2005) was an early Indian film to centre an HIV-positive gay protagonist. By 2009 the platform existed; the explosion came in 2010 with Udaan and the formal opening of the Hindi indie decade.

06Production and industrial context

Three industrial events shaped the decade more than any single film. The first was the 2001 grant of official industry status, which sounds ceremonial but is not. Banks were now permitted to lend against film projects under structured credit, and the Industrial Development Bank of India and ICICI began to extend production loans on a basis the Hindi industry had not previously had access to. The cash economy that had financed Hindi cinema through the 1980s and early 1990s did not vanish — it persisted at the lower budget tier — but the upper tier moved decisively into transparent corporate accounts within five years.

The second was the UTV-Disney transaction, which was technically a 2012 closing but whose terms were negotiated through 2010-2011. UTV's $1.4-billion valuation was the first time a Hindi-cinema studio had been priced on a model comparable to American studio M&A, and the deal effectively imported Disney's slate-management and overseas-distribution discipline into the Hindi tentpole tier. The third was the post-2008 financial crisis tightening, which exposed the over-leveraged production budgets of the late-2000s Reliance-DreamWorks partnership and several Eros-financed slates and forced a 2010-2012 correction at the upper end. The corrections, in retrospect, were the prelude to the franchise consolidation that the 2010s would deliver — the Yash Raj Spy Universe, the Rohit Shetty Cop Universe, the Bhansali period film as standalone tentpole.

The second was the UTV-Disney transaction, which was technically a 2012 closing but whose terms were negotiated through 2010-2011.

07The leading women of the decade

The 2000s leading-actress economy was anchored by a small group of stars whose careers spanned both the Khan-tier prestige film and the writer-led mid-budget. Rani Mukerji's run from Saathiya (2002) through Hum Tum (2004), Veer-Zaara (2004), Black (2005) and Kabhi Alvida Naa Kehna (2006) made her the decade's most decorated leading actress, with a National Award for Best Actress and four Filmfare wins. Black, in which she played a deaf-blind woman taught by Amitabh Bachchan's institutionalised teacher, remains the role her critical biography is built around — though contemporary reassessments by Anupama Chopra and others have questioned the film's larger sentimental architecture without diminishing the performance.

Aishwarya Rai's Devdas (2002), Dhoom 2 (2006), Mani Ratnam's Guru (2007) and Ashutosh Gowariker's Jodhaa Akbar (2008) gave her the decade's most internationally visible profile, including the Cannes jury membership and the crossover into English-language work with Bride and Prejudice (2004). Kareena Kapoor broke through with Refugee (2000), then built a sustained run through K3G (2001), Sudhir Mishra's Chameli (2003), Vishal Bhardwaj's Omkara (2006), Imtiaz Ali's Jab We Met (2007) and 3 Idiots (2009). Preity Zinta's Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Kal Ho Naa Ho (2003) and Veer-Zaara (2004) made her the decade's defining romantic-comedy lead. Vidya Balan's Parineeta (2005) and Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) prefigured the writer-led mid-budget stardom she would consolidate in the 2010s with The Dirty Picture and Kahaani. Konkona Sen Sharma's Mr. and Mrs. Iyer (2002), Madhur Bhandarkar's Page 3 (2005), Omkara (2006) and Wake Up Sid (2009) established her as the decade's principal indie-prestige actress, working across registers in a way few of her contemporaries attempted.

08What the decade left behind

Three durable shifts. The first is the corporatisation of the upper budget tier — the producer-led, slate-financed, overseas-distribution-aware Hindi tentpole that the 2000s built and that the 2010s extended into the franchise economy. The second is the multiplex-enabled mid-budget niche, which gave the indie current a theatrical revenue model and made directors like Dibakar Banerjee, Anurag Kashyap and the Anurag Basu of Life in a... Metro structurally viable in a way the parallel-cinema directors of the 1980s had never been. The third is the emergence of the writer-director as a category. Farhan Akhtar, Rajkumar Hirani, Vishal Bhardwaj, Imtiaz Ali, Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee all built their careers on screenplays they had written or co-written, in a decade when the dominant Hindi-cinema mode had been director-as-craftsman working over a producer-supplied script. That writer-director generation is what the 2010s indie wave is structurally made of, and the 2000s are where they trained.