Men in thick, flowing beards. Shotguns that seemingly come with infinite shells. Fights on top of helipads, trucks, bridges. A background score that drowns out everything else. And, a box office register that doesn’t stop ringing for angry young bros.

This roughly sums up the year’s blockbusters. Of course, nothing matches the misogyny of Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s A-rated ‘Animal’. It has the male character cracking jokes around menstruation, gratuitous violence and even the hero asking a woman to lick his shoes to prove her love for him.

“Like revenge tourism, 2023 was the year for revenge movie-watching in India,” says Girish Johar, Mumbai-based producer and film business expert. “Action has always been a safe bet. However, after the pandemic, filmmakers and producers know they need big-scale, larger-than-life films to pull audiences out of their homes. Other types of films, they prefer to watch on OTT,” he adds.

The statistics bear this out. The top seven grossers in 2023 all belonged to the action genre, including ‘Jawan’, ‘Pathaan’, ‘Gadar 2’, ‘Jailer’, ‘Leo’, ‘Animal’ and ‘Tiger 3’. ‘Rocky Aur Rani Kii Prem Kahaani’, which took the eighth spot, stood out as one of the only rom-coms that emerged a hit. There were several female-led films such as Kareena Kapoor Khan-starrer ‘Jaane Jaan’, Tabu-led ‘Khufiya’ etc but they did not hit the theatres and were directly released on OTT platforms.

Through the years, Hindi cinema’s male protagonists have shown several shades. The 1950s showed a tempered masculinity, gentled by the trauma of independence and partition, hopeful about the future. Think of Guru Dutt’s romantic artist — philosophical and doubting. Raj Kapoor’s tramp is bewildered by industrial modernity, Dev Anand is a louche charmer. None of them is particularly muscular, some even have an androgynous quality. In these early movies, there was a resistance to social norms, a questioning and conflict around tradition, even as many films implicitly reaffirmed gender conventions.

Of course, the straitjackets of virtue and good-girlism confined women. They were usually props and symbols, whether as deified mothers and bhabhis, vamps and ‘items’, or even ‘heroines’: love interests with no independent character arcs or complexity. But the men had range.

The ’70s moved from Rajesh Khanna singing about lost love, to Amitabh Bachchan’s smouldering rage at unfulfilled promises to the working classes. In the ’80s, this subaltern male anger turned into a darker thing, with lawlessness and vigilantism as central themes. It was pretty much standard to show stalking and harassment as a prelude to love. The movies lingered over rape, showing it as a titillating spectacle, and as a method to teach other men a lesson, as a loot of izzat.

The post-liberalization era saw themes of love and rebellion emerge, with romantic heroes grabbing the spotlight. However, a 2002 study of Hindi movies from the late ’90s said moderate sexual violence against female characters was “depicted as fun, enjoyable, and a normal expression of romantic love”. Now, a new hype masculine ideal has gathered strength.

While the depiction of violence in films isn’t new, the present surge marks a ‘shift’ in the use of it, says Geetanjali Chadha, professor of gender and cinema at Ashoka University. “During the ‘angry young man’ era, the violence had a purpose. It was more about the difference between the rich and the poor, and made the audience root for the underdog. Today, it’s closely tied to nationalism, strength, and glamour. The women too are no longer passive, often playing a key role in accepting it,” she says.

Economics plays a role too, points out Shrayana Bhattacharya, economist and author of ‘Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh’, which analyzed the moviegoing experience in India through the lens of gender and class. “Because men hold 82% of the country’s income, movies that depict strong men may do better at the box office than those that depict more vulnerable men or stronger female parts,” she explains.

However, while the action genre means good business, it has also raised questions about the shrinking space for women moviegoers and women’s stories. Paridhi, a 22-year old from Delhi, says the rise of such ‘alpha male’ characters, shrinks her options. “The problem is not with violence, but the glorification of it. I also went to watch ‘Pathaan’ and ‘Jawan’ in the theatres, but with ‘Animal’, the clips really made me uncomfortable. Looking at its collections, other male actors will definitely gravitate towards this genre too.”

However, Nikhil Taneja, co-founder of youth-centred media organization Yuvaa, and host of the podcast ‘Be A Man, Yaar’, says he isn’t convinced that hypermasculinity is the only thing that works. “There’s a space for alternative conversations, even in action films. In ‘Pathaan’, for instance, Shah Rukh Khan has a female boss, and is saved by a female spy. In ‘Jawan’, he has an army full of young women,” he points out.

However, he adds that it’s important to understand why many young males today are tilting towards ‘alpha male’ content, espoused not only by films like ‘Animal’ and ‘Kabir Singh’, but also podcasters such as Andrew Tate. “I have interacted with over 15,000 students across campuses in the last four years for research work. While women dealing with various forms of patriarchy are often able to find sisterhood and community, men have told me they lack positive communities to talk about loneliness, which leads to bitterness, anger, and violence,” he says.

In a scenario like this, they often turn to characters they can relate to, or those who vindicate their emotions, he says, adding that therefore, filmmakers should have a certain degree of accountability of what they’re putting out there.

“Toxic characters should be represented on screen, but they have to be self-aware and have context. For instance, in films like ‘Darr’ and ‘Anjaam’, everyone knew SRK was the bad guy and he met his fate in the end. However, in some films being made today, if the directors put a cool background track as the character commits violence, they make it a character worth aspiring for. Men look at it and think it’s cool.”

Jasmeet K Reen,, writer of the critically acclaimed ‘Darlings’, feels that artistic freedom is paramount, and the audience can be the only judge. Her Alia Bhatt-starrer depicted a woman breaking free of a marriage filled with physical and psychological abuse. Some scenes were graphic, and the writer grappled with how to depict them.

“Every filmmaker has their own ideology which, whether they like it or not, reflects in their films. If I’m making ‘Darlings’, what I feel, what my ethics are, what I feel about sexism, what I feel about gender, what I feel about violence, it will show in the film. It also means that everybody has a distinct voice and I cannot control how other people should tell their stories,” she says.