Shakun Batra says Bollywood romance is selling Gen Z a fantasy

Bollywood romance has long promised a tidy arc: you meet the right person, obstacles melt, and forever begins. Shakun Batra believes that promise is precisely why Hindi love stories are struggling to connect with Gen Z.

In a recent conversation with HT City, the filmmaker whose Lust Stories 3 segment traces a messy romance between two people in their 20s explained that the traditional formula feels false to young viewers who know relationships rarely resolve so neatly.

The fantasy that stopped working

The familiar Bollywood template, he said, goes something like this: “You meet this person who is your soulmate, and then life is amazing, but it never is.” Real relationships are complicated, inconvenient and often unresolved. When films keep ignoring that texture, younger audiences look elsewhere.

That is one reason Batra pointed to the pull of international shows such as Off Campus and Sterling Point among Indian youth. They are not necessarily more glamorous, but their emotional mess feels closer to life than a soulmate who solves everything.

Authenticity over algorithm

Batra drew a harder line when asked how filmmakers should respond. He said a director cannot climb into someone else’s head and design a story around what that person might want. If you start there, he argued, you are doing a work-for-hire job: trying to make a viewer feel good rather than saying what you need to say.

His alternative is to start from real feeling and then simplify it enough for someone else to receive it. That honesty may not pay off immediately. Batra said it sometimes takes a year or two for people to come around, and he accepts that delay.

The cost of not chasing trends

This stance has not always been comfortable. Batra admitted he has sat through enough career meetings where the room was excited about what is working — “ye chal raha hai” — while he could not bring himself to copy it. He would rather take breaks than make something he does not believe in.

The point is not that commercial success is irrelevant. It is that chasing a trend without conviction usually produces a weak version of the thing that was already working.

What love stories could try next

For filmmakers and fans watching young audiences drift away, Batra’s argument offers a practical reset:

• Begin with the feeling you need to express, not the audience you are trying to please.
• Simplify that truth so it travels, but do not sand away the mess.
• Give honest work time to land instead of expecting instant acceptance.
• Resist making a copy of the trend that is currently climbing.

None of this is a guarantee. But it is a clear alternative to the soulmate fantasy that has left too many viewers feeling that Bollywood romance describes a world they have never lived in.

Source: The Times of India