He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
With Dhurandhar: The Revenge having broken box-office records and movies such as Accused and Mardaani 3 performing exceedingly well on Netflix, the hot streak for Indian titles around the world is showing no signs of abating. The latest on this list is a three-hour epic that underperformed at the box office in February, but was able to find a spot on Prime Video’s global top 10 list upon its streaming debut. The movie hails from Vishal Bhardwaj, who last made the Netflix spy thriller Khufiya. However, he remains best known for his trilogy of William Shakespeare adaptations — Maqbool (Macbeth), Omkara (Othello), and Haider (Hamlet).
His latest film reunites him with his Haider star Shahid Kapoor; they also worked together on the cult classic crime thriller Kaminey and the period epic Rangoon. The new movie is set in Mumbai in the 1990s, with Kapoor playing a mafia assassin who kills his adversaries with a blade. The plot kicks into gear when a woman approaches him to seek retribution against a gangster operating out of Spain; the gangster had her husband murdered, and has beef with Kapoor’s character as well. As with Tom Hardy’s character in Mad Max: Fury Road, he agrees to help the woman, but he soon realizes that she isn’t a damsel in distress at all.
Your answers have pointed to one action hero above all others. This is the person built to have your back — for better or considerably, spectacularly worse.
Your partner doesn’t talk much, doesn’t need to, and will have assessed every threat in your immediate environment before you’ve finished your first sentence. John Rambo is not a man of plans or politics — he is a force of nature shaped by survival, loyalty, and a capacity for endurance that goes beyond anything training can produce. He will not leave you behind. He has never left anyone behind who deserved to come home. What you get with Rambo is the most capable, most quietly ferocious partner imaginable — one who has been through things that would have broken anyone else, and who chose to keep going anyway. You’ll never need to ask if he has your back. You’ll just know.
Your partner will arrive perfectly dressed, perfectly briefed, and with a cover story so convincing it’ll take you a moment to remember what’s actually true. James Bond is the most professionally dangerous person in any room he enters — and the most disarmingly charming, which is the point. He operates in a world of layers, where nothing is what it appears and every advantage is used without apology. You’ll never be bored. You’ll occasionally be furious. But when it matters — when the mission is genuinely on the line and the margin for error has collapsed to nothing — Bond is exactly the partner you want. He has survived things that have no business being survivable. He does it with style. That is not nothing.
Your partner will know the history, the language, the cultural context, and exactly why the thing everyone else is ignoring is actually the most important thing in the room. Indiana Jones is brilliant, reckless, and occasionally impossible — but he is also one of the most resourceful, most genuinely knowledgeable partners you could find yourself beside. He approaches every situation with a scholar’s eye and a brawler’s instinct, which is an unusual combination and a remarkably effective one. He hates snakes and gets personally attached to objects of historical significance, both of which will slow you down at least once. It doesn’t matter. What Indy brings is irreplaceable — and the adventures you’ll have together will be the kind people write books about. Assuming you survive them.
Your partner was not supposed to be here. He does not have the right equipment, the right information, or anything approaching the right odds. He has a sarcastic remark and an absolute refusal to accept that the situation is as bad as it looks. John McClane is the greatest accidental hero in the history of action cinema — a man whose superpower is stubbornness, whose contingency plan is improvisation, and whose capacity to absorb punishment and keep moving would be alarming if it weren’t so useful. He will complain the entire time. He will make it significantly more chaotic than it needed to be. And he will absolutely, unconditionally, without question come through when it counts. Yippee-ki-yay.
Your partner has already run seventeen scenarios by the time you’ve finished reading the briefing, and the plan he’s settled on involves at least two things that should be physically impossible. Ethan Hunt operates at the absolute edge of human capability — technically, physically, and intellectually — and he brings the same relentless precision to protecting his partners that he brings to dismantling organisations that shouldn’t exist. He is not easy to know and he will never fully tell you everything. But he will carry the weight of the mission so completely, so absolutely, that your job is simply to trust him — and the remarkable thing is that trusting him always turns out to be the right call. The mission will be impossible. He will complete it anyway.
The movie combines the stylized storytelling of George Miller’s dystopian series with epic romance, Western-style vengeance, and seedy crime drama. The film in question is O’Romeo; it also stars Triptii Dimri, who rose to fame with a supporting role in the controversial blockbuster Animal, alongside the veteran actor Nana Patekar, and Avinash Tiwary, who worked opposite Dimri in the Netflix fantasy film Bulbbul. O’Romeo received mixed reviews upon release in theaters; the movie now holds a 46% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. According to FlixPatrol, it landed on the global Prime Video top 10 a couple of days after its debut on the streamer, when the leaderboard was topped by the Chris Hemsworth-led movie Crime 101.
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.