Mumbai: A film being spoken about as an underperformer before a ticket was sold has ended its theatrical run with a figure that complicates that narrative. Sidharth Malhotra, in his first joint appearance with Kiara Advani on Koffee With Karan, said the skepticism around The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest was a lesson in how Bollywood talks about its own slate.
The fantasy adventure, released theatrically in September 2026, collected ₹91.49 crore worldwide and is now streaming on Prime Video. Malhotra and Advani discussed that run with Karan Johar, who noted the earlier chatter questioning the film’s box office prospects.
Doubt in the trade, turnout in the halls
Malhotra did not deny the doubt. Instead, he framed it as an industry blind spot. There is ‘an India and there is a Bharat,’ he said, and ‘Bharat is what is coming out to watch our films.’ The audience, he argued, is looking for stories that feel rooted and culturally specific rather than shaped by a narrow urban conversation.
The film could hardly be more specific in its source material. It draws on folklore attached to the Van Devi Temple near Bihta in Bihar. Malhotra plays Rishi, a Mumbai-based man who travels with his wife Mamta, played by Tamannaah Bhatia, to the village of Devanchal, where a warning against entering the forest after dark sets the story in motion. The actor said the film came ‘perfectly fitting that bracket’ in its writing, performance and sequences.
- The film: The Vvaan: Force of the Forrest, a Hindi fantasy adventure.
- The run: ₹91.49 crore worldwide in theatres, now on Prime Video.
- The source: Folklore around Bihar’s Van Devi Temple, near Bihta.
The India-Bharat split as box-office logic
The line is more than an actor defending a film. It names a divide Hindi cinema has long struggled to measure: the assumed taste of a small industry conversation against the actual ticket-buying behaviour of a wider audience. A folklore-rooted film, once treated as a risk for mainstream theatres, becomes a different proposition if the audience is asking for cultural specificity.
Malhotra also made a structural plea. He described an industry where few have anything good to say and said it needs ‘a sense of an industry where people help each other.’ During the rapid-fire segment, when Johar asked about critics, he returned to the same thought: give your opinion, but do not let it become ‘discouraging people to go to the theatres.’
A final-season moment
The exchange took place in the ninth and final season of Koffee With Karan, which first premiered in 2003 and is now streaming on JioHotstar. That setting gives the comment a historical coda: a show built on candid, often provocative industry talk is ending just as its guests are asking what that talk costs a film before it opens.
Source: India Weekly
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