MUMBAI: It’s not a line the industry throws around lightly, but with Dhurandhar gearing up for a thunderous opening, a curious pattern around Aditya Dhar has become impossible to ignore. He may be the only director in modern Hindi cinema who, with just two films, has given both his leading men the biggest opening and the most defining role of their careers.
His debut, Uri: The Surgical Strike, didn’t just turn Vicky Kaushal into a national star but it handed him a role that still sits at the centre of his identity. The film exploded, stunned the trade with its numbers and pushed Vicky into the top tier with one performance. Years later, “How’s the josh?” still follows him everywhere.
Now, with Dhurandhar, backed by Jio Studios and B62 Studios, Dhar seems geared up to do it all over again and this time for Ranveer Singh. Trade sources are already calling the film Ranveer’s cleanest, strongest pre-release surge in years. The scale, the action grammar, the world-building and everything about the film has the craft of a National-award winning director writing another star-defining chapter.
And the symmetry is striking. Here are two films, two leading men and their career-redefining box office openings and mostly roles that shift the perception and game for the actors playing them.
There are directors with longer filmographies and bigger box-office histories, but what Dhar has pulled of, twice, back-to-back, without missing a beat, is almost unheard of. It places him in a unique corner of the industry as the filmmaker whose stories don’t just succeed, they reshape the men at the centre of them. If Dhurandhar lands the way it’s tracking, Dhar won’t just be two films old. He’ll be establishing a streak no one saw coming, but everyone is now watching closely.
Produced by Jyoti Deshpande, Lokesh Dhar and Aditya Dhar, Dhurandhar releases worldwide on December 5, 2025.
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