Alia Bhatt arrived at Cannes 2026 with the usual glare of international attention, but it was her take on Bollywood’s entrenched audience logic that gave her appearance real weight. While representing L’Oréal Paris as its global ambassador, the actor used a festival conversation to challenge a familiar industry argument, that films must be shaped around male viewers because they supposedly drive the box office.
Bhatt, back at Cannes for her second outing at the festival, argued that this thinking boxes cinema into a narrow imagination of who stories are for. Speaking at the event, she said, “In India, when we talk about box office and numbers, there is a conversation that comes up pretty often, which is 75% of the movie-going audience is male, so we need to cater to the masses.” She then pushed the point further, asking, “If we are catering just to the men, then what happens to the women?” For Bhatt, the larger issue is not who leads a film, but whether storytelling itself is strong enough to cut across those divisions.
Alia Bhatt Questions Bollywood’S Gendered Box Office Formula
Bhatt’s remarks landed because they cut straight through a long-standing trade shorthand. Her argument was not about making films only for women, but about moving beyond the idea that one gender must be the default audience and the other an afterthought. She said she wants more films where “the storytelling takes centre stage” and where it should not matter “whether it stars a man or a woman”.
That sentiment also connects neatly with the phase of her career she is building now. Rather than simply saying the industry should think differently, Bhatt’s recent choices suggest she is trying to work inside that shift.
Alia Bhatt’s Recent And Upcoming Work
In Jigra, released in 2024, Bhatt stepped into a tense, emotionally driven film that also had her onboard as producer, underlining her interest in stories powered by character and conviction rather than familiar market formulas. Before that, 2023 saw her move between two very different spaces with Karan Johar’s Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani, opposite Ranveer Singh, and Heart of Stone on Netflix, her Hollywood debut with Gal Gadot and Jamie Dornan. Together, those projects showed an actor comfortable moving from mainstream Hindi spectacle to global franchise territory without losing her own screen identity.
Her upcoming slate extends that trajectory. Alpha, now in post-production and slated for 2026, places her at the centre of a large-scale studio film, while Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s Love & War, currently in production with Ranbir Kapoor and Vicky Kaushal, brings her back into an ambitious theatrical canvas backed by one of Hindi cinema’s most distinctive directors. Seen alongside her Cannes remarks, the line-up feels less like a routine star roadmap and more like a steady case for films that are led by world-building, emotion, and dramatic pull, not by dated assumptions about who is sitting in the audience.
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