Alpha, Alia and the business of female stardom

Mumbai: For all the progress Hindi cinema likes to claim, one uncomfortable truth keeps returning to the surface and that is, the industry still does not know how to build women into lasting theatrical phenomena. Alia Bhatt’s Alpha is only the latest reminder. The mixed reaction to it at the box-office and the negativity on social media has exposed something larger than BO arithmetic. It has reopened the old question of why female-led films in Bollywood are still treated as exceptions and not as part of the mainstream commercial fare.

That question matters because Alia is not an untested performer. In fact, she is one of the most accomplished stars of her generation, with both critical and commercial credibility. She has already shown that she can anchor a film, shape public curiosity and carry emotional complexity with ease. And yet, the moment a project like Alpha enters the market, it is often judged against an unfairly narrow standard of not whether it is good cinema, but whether a woman-led film can ‘open’ like a male-led event film. That context is part of the problem.

While Hindi cinema has always been willing to admire strong women on screen, it has been less willing to consistently pay for them in theatres and that gap shows up long before a film reaches the box office. It shows up in the budget sheet, the release strategy and the number of screens a distributor is willing to risk.

Start with money. Female-led films are routinely marketed on a fraction of what a comparable male-led film receives. Fewer promotional windows, fewer brand tie-ins and fewer high-value trailer drops. A film can be well-reviewed and still walk into its opening weekend with a fraction of the visibility that shapes first-day collections. In an industry where opening numbers set the narrative for a film’s entire run, that is not a small handicap, it is often decisive.

Female Characters

This is not a new issue. The industry has produced unforgettable female characters and a few rare female superstars, but the Indian film system has rarely built sustained institutions around them. The rare exceptions being Meena Kumari, Vyjanthimala, Hema Malini and Sridevi. The last, Sridevi, emerged at a time when economics and number-game started taking precedence in the cinematic evolution of Bollywood. From being the glamourous prop to the hero in Himmatwala (1983) and Tohfa (1984) to having films written around her with Nagina (1986), Mr India (1987), Chandni (1989), Chaalbaaz (1989), Lamhe (1991) and Khuda Gawah (1992), she turned the tables around for heroines and continues to remain the clearest historical example of what a true female star in Indian cinema can look like.

At her peak, Sridevi was not just admired, she was bankable. Films could revolve around her. Her presence changed the energy of a project. In certain films, heroes had to adjust to her command rather than the other way around. That kind of authority was not accidental. It was the result of extraordinary talent meeting a rare moment in the industry’s history when audiences, producers and writers briefly allowed a woman to dominate the frame.

But Sridevi's career also proves the rarity of that model. She remains the benchmark because few actresses after her, not even stars like Madhuri Dixit, Kajol, Aishwarya Rai, Kareena Kapoor or Deepika Padukone, were consistently given the same kind of female-led commercial vehicles. The industry celebrated her, but did not fully institutionalise her kind of stardom. Four decades later, the industry still hasn’t built the pipeline that would allow her successors to go beyond her. Deepika seemed poised to replicate that model before stepping away from it in recent years.

Revealing Discussion

That gap is what makes the discussion around Alia and Alpha so revealing. Alia is one of the few contemporary actresses who has repeatedly crossed the boundary between being an actor and star. She has done the intimate, performance-driven roles, such as Highway (2014), Udta Punjab (2016), Raazi (2018) and Gully Boy (2019) that win critical acclaim , and she has also participated in larger commercial ventures that expand her visibility, such as Brahmāstra: Part One – Shiva (2022), RRR (2022), Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani (2023), Gangubai Kathiawadi (2022) and Badrinath Ki Dulhania (2017). In theory, she should be exactly the kind of actress around whom a new era of female-led theatrical storytelling can be built. In practice, the industry still seems unsure how to market that proposition with confidence.

Part of the issue lies in the way Hindi cinema packages women-led films. Too often, these projects are framed as either ‘serious’ or ‘special’. They are presented as prestige dramas, social messages or exceptions to the norm. The masculine model of stardom, by contrast, is built on repetition, scale, and genre certainty. Male stars are supported by action, comedy, spectacle and franchise logic. Female stars are still too often limited to emotionally dense dramas or films that must prove their worth before the audience even enters the hall.

Genre gatekeeping also runs deeper than casting. Action franchises, cop universes and multi-part spectacles are almost never designed around a woman from the outset. Actresses get inducted into these worlds as guests in someone else's franchise, not as the anchor of their own. Without a female-led equivalent of a returning franchise, there is no mechanism for an actress's stardom to compound the way a male star's does, film after film.

Feminist Undertones

That’s not to say there were no feminist undertones in Lokah, but they felt organic. Naslen, the film’s hero and other male actors, including superheroes played by superstars Dulquer Salmaan and Tovino Thomas, seemed to be having a blast playing second fiddle to the heroine.

There is also a quieter, upstream problem in the scarcity of women writing and directing stories in Bollywood, barring Farah Khan, Meghna Gulzar and Zoya Akhtar. Lokah, in fact, had actress Santhy Balachandran playing an important role in giving a woman’s perspective to the narrative as the additional screenplay writer and dramaturgist. It is difficult to imagine something similar happening in the male-dominated Hindi film industry, unless the filmmaker happens to be the very conscientious Farhan Akhtar or an Aamir Khan.