By Ayesha Khan 
New Delhi, April 7: Virat Kohli had a day off. RCB had just beaten CSK. And the man, apparently, just wanted to watch a film.
So he did. Nearly four hours of one. And then he picked up his phone and wrote something that the internet has not really stopped talking about since.
Kohli watched Dhurandhar: The Revenge, the spy thriller that has been absolutely cleaning up at the box office since March 19, and came out of it visibly shaken in the best way possible. His Instagram story was not some carefully worded celebrity endorsement. It didn’t feel like that at all. It felt like a guy who just got hit by something and needed to tell someone.
“Saw the film today and dare I say that I have never seen a cinematic experience like this made in India,” he wrote. “It brought out every kind of emotion to the surface, and I didn’t flinch once for almost 4 hours.”
Four hours. During IPL season. That alone tells you something.
When Kohli Calls You a Genius, You’ve Earned It
He saved special praise for two people. Director Aditya Dhar got called a “genius.” Kohli wrote that the man’s talent and conviction were visible in every frame. And then came the big one. Ranveer Singh, who plays the double-identity agent Hamza Ali Mazari and Jaskirat Singh Rangi in the film, got singled out in a way that stopped a lot of people mid-scroll.
“You have attained a different level after this movie,” Kohli wrote. “Your performance was beyond brilliant. Absolutely WOW.”
Now, celebrities praise each other all the time. It’s practically an industry. But this one hit differently for a simple reason Kohli is not known for throwing around superlatives cheaply. He’s competitive to a fault. He knows what it looks like when someone operates at the very top of their game, because he’s been doing it himself for two decades. When he says someone has “attained a different level,” he’s using the only language he genuinely understands.
Fans got it immediately. Social media lit up with #GOATmeetsGOAT trending almost instantly. Aditya Dhar himself reshared the post and said, visibly overwhelmed, that being called a genius by Kohli was one of the most meaningful moments of his career.
What the Film Actually Is
If you haven’t watched either part yet, a quick breakdown.
Dhurandhar: The Revenge is the second and final part of the Dhurandhar duology, both written and directed by Aditya Dhar, the same man who gave us Uri: The Surgical Strike back in 2019. Both films were shot together between July 2024 and October 2025 across India and Thailand, with additional filming as late as early 2026. The story picks up from where Part 1 ended.
Ranveer’s character, an undercover RAW operative who has burrowed so deep into Karachi’s criminal underworld that he’s now feared as “Sher-e-Baloch,” is trying to hold himself together while avenging the 26/11 attacks and navigating political landmines that go all the way up to Pakistani power corridors. The film loosely draws from real events, Operation Lyari, the 2014 general election, and demonetisation and weaves them into a fictional espionage narrative that, apparently, does not let you breathe for its entire runtime.
The cast is stacked: Arjun Rampal, R. Madhavan, Sanjay Dutt, Sara Arjun, and a Yami Gautam cameo. Akshaye Khanna returns from the first film. The soundtrack, including the track “Aari Aari” composed by Shashwat Sachdev with Bombay Rockers, has been everywhere. T-Series picked up the music rights for Rs 27 crore, which, given how the film has performed, must feel like a bargain right now.
One more thing worth knowing: the CBFC gave it an A certificate, and the final cut runs 229 minutes. That’s after some scenes were trimmed. This is not a light watch.
The Numbers Are Just Obscene
Let’s be honest, even without Kohli’s review, the story here would still be extraordinary.
The film opened with Rs 43 crore in paid previews on Day 0, then exploded to Rs 102.55 crore on its first full day. The opening weekend alone brought in Rs 503 crore domestically. By the end of its first week, it had crossed Rs 649 crore in India net. By Day 18, it crossed Rs 1,000 crore domestically, making it only the third Indian film ever, after Pushpa 2 and Baahubali 2, to hit that mark in India’s net collections.
Globally, as of its third weekend, Dhurandhar: The Revenge has crossed Rs 1,622 crore, roughly $174 million. According to Variety, it became the first Indian film to cross $25 million in North America, breaking a record that had been held by Baahubali 2: The Conclusion for years. It also crossed €1 million in Germany, a first for any Indian film in that market.
On the all-time chart for Indian cinema, it now sits fourth behind only Dangal, Baahubali 2, and Pushpa 2.
All of this, by the way, despite the film being banned across all Gulf Cooperation Council countries, just like its predecessor. The first film’s foreign distributor had estimated that the Gulf ban cost them around Rs 90 crore in earnings. The sequel has clearly absorbed that loss and then some.
The Controversy Nobody’s Pretending Doesn’t Exist
Here is where any honest piece of journalism has to slow down.
The film has divided critics in a way that goes beyond taste. On Rotten Tomatoes, the approval rating sits at just 40% among professional critics. When Hindustan Times looked at those reviews in late March, all the positive ones had come from Indian publications. Every review from an international outlet was negative. The criticism has been consistent: the film is too violent, too long, and too comfortable with its own political slant, particularly in how it depicts Pakistan and Muslim characters.
International reviewers haven’t been gentle. The New York Times noted the film’s tendency to weave Indian nationalist theatrics into South Asian historical flashpoints with escalating intensity. Some critics went further, calling parts of it outright propaganda.
The defence has been equally firm. Indian commentators have pointed out that calling out a Bollywood spy thriller for nationalism while staying silent about Saving Private Ryan or Zero Dark Thirty reveals its own double standard. That argument has merit. It also doesn’t fully resolve the questions the film raises about how it frames its antagonists.
The honest answer is that Dhurandhar: The Revenge is a film that people are going to argue about for a while. It is simultaneously a genuinely impressive cinematic achievement and a deeply ideological one. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out.
Ranveer Singh, Finally Back
There’s a quiet subplot here that the box office numbers don’t fully capture.
Ranveer Singh had a rough few years. After the peak of Padmaavat and Gully Boy, the hits dried up. There were misfires. There were questions not just in trade circles, but in general conversation about whether he had peaked early, or whether the intensity that made him electric had somehow gone stale. It’s the kind of thing that happens to very big stars when audiences sense they’re coasting.
Dhurandhar Part 1 in December 2025 shut most of that conversation down. The Revenge has buried it. This is now comfortably the biggest run of his career, and it’s not particularly close. More than the numbers, though, it’s Kohli’s specific choice of words, “you have attained a different level,” that seems to have meant something to people. Because that’s not praise for a performance. That’s recognition of a transformation.
For now, the film is heading into its fourth week with no sign of slowing down. Kohli is back training, with RCB’s next match against Rajasthan Royals in Guwahati on April 10. And somewhere between cricket season and cinema season, India is apparently managing both just fine.
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Arun Upadhayay