For a stretch from the late 1990s into the early 2010s, Hindi cinema treated children as a real theatrical audience. Filmmakers such as Vishal Bhardwaj made Makdee and The Blue Umbrella; Anurag Kashyap followed Black Friday with Return of Hanuman. Yash Raj Films and Dharma Productions backed children’s titles, while smaller films—Stanley Ka Dabba and Jajantaram Mamantaram among them—found their own place. Today, the trailer for Little Thomas, built around an eight-year-old protagonist, is being described by observers as “rare” and “niche.”
A market that outgrew its own genre
The chief change, according to the filmmakers Hindustan Times spoke with, is a shift toward box-office certainty. Kaushal Oza, writer-director of Little Thomas, says he had to pitch the film repeatedly before securing a producer. Executives wanted a reference point, he recalls, and the response was blunt: “Children’s film kaunsi chalti hai.”
That scepticism sits oddly next to global results. Producer Ranjan Singh, whose career began with Taare Zameen Par, points out that three of the year’s top 10 highest-grossing films globally are children’s films. PVR, he says, has a dedicated children’s subsection with about 80-90 theatres across India; roughly 90% of what plays on those screens through the year is Hollywood product.
Who children want to watch now
Sonam Nair, who debuted with Gippi, describes taking children to a Mika Singh performance and watching them demand the Pushpa title track, then perform the full step. “That is the change,” she says. Oza heard a similar warning from writer Jaideep Sahni: children are watching Singham and Taarak Mehta, and a children’s film has to compete with those titles.
The missing institutional push
Anurag Kashyap, who directed the animated Return of Hanuman, attributes the decline partly to the loss of the Children’s Film Society, India. The body, founded in 1955 and once led by figures such as Sai Paranjpye, Nafisa Ali, Nandita Das and Amol Gupte, was merged into the National Film Development Corporation in 2022. “It was almost mandated for the industry to keep making films that catered to children. That is gone now,” Kashyap says.
He adds a pointed joke about star logic: if India were to remake Home Alone, the three villains would need to be stars. That dependence on names is one reason a small, non-star children’s film now reads as unusual.
What could bring the wave back
Producers argue the obstacles are structural rather than a lack of demand.
- Surety: financiers prioritise predictable opening weekends over slow-building word of mouth.
- Audience habit: young viewers are being pulled toward adult blockbusters.
- Institutional gap: the CFSI merger removed a standing mandate for children’s cinema.
- Star dependency: budgets and casting are shaped around big names, not stories.
Anushka Shah, a producer on Little Thomas, says distribution is built around evening shows and opening-weekend star power, while a children’s film needs morning and afternoon slots, school-holiday timing and weeks of word of mouth. Ranjan Singh offers a simpler path: if a film has limited business potential, make it cheaply. “If you are settled on a story, then you find a way to make it,” he says.
That is the hope around Little Thomas: not that children’s films will return as a mass event overnight, but that low-cost, well-timed titles can rebuild a habit that Bollywood has spent a decade losing.
Source: Hindustan Times
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