Bollywood Wants To Be Instagram

But Instagram has no desire to become Bollywood

A friend of mine represents influencers and creators. A larger Bollywood-affiliated talent house came sniffing around with a hiring offer. The number they quoted was, if I’m honest, insulting. My friend called me, half furious, half bewildered. “They didn't understand what I've built," she said. "Like what I have is just a contact list.

What that Bollywood agency was actually doing (though they’d never admit it, obviously,) was pricing a creator business using the only framework they know. Reach as a vanity metric. They have spent two decades in an industry where a star’s value is determined by their last box office number, their magazine cover count, the directors they know, the paparazzi they can hustle, and their PR cycle. They looked at an influencer manager and saw the same thing with a smaller scope of work.

They were wrong. The business my friend built isn’t a contact list. It’s a trust arbitrage. And trust, in 2026, is the only currency in the attention economy that actually converts to sales. You can’t acquire that from a Bollywood rolodex. You can’t manufacture it with a ₹8 crore ad film. You build it by showing up in someone’s phone, in their own language, talking about things they actually care about, consistently, for years. That’s what creators do. The Bollywood agency didn’t understand what they were trying to buy, which is, incidentally, exactly why the industry they come from is in the trouble it’s in.

The easiest way to understand what’s happening is to stop thinking of this as a media shift and start thinking of it as a pricing error. Bollywood is mispricing trust because it still treats attention as the asset and reach as the proxy. Brands are buying that trust inefficiently, paying for borrowed feeling that doesn’t convert the way it used to. Creators, on the other hand, are compounding trust in public, over time, in front of the exact audience that will eventually be asked to buy something. The asset isn’t the content. It’s the relationship the content builds. And right now, that relationship sits with the creator, not the platform, not the studio, and definitely not the agency trying to spreadsheet its way into understanding it.

Bollywood really wants you to believe this is a rough patch. A few bad films, bad luck, audiences will come back, Bollywood is forever, We Are India, etc. They won’t. Or at least, not in the way they’re hoping.

In 2024, original Hindi films lost ₹1,800 crore at the box office compared to the year before. This was the year Stree 2 happened. The best-performing original Hindi film in years couldn’t compensate for how badly everything around it collapsed. Roughly 70-80% of Bollywood films don’t recover their production and marketing costs. Bade Miyan Chote Miyan cost ₹350 crore to make. It earned ₹111 crore. Akshay Kumar, who built his whole brand on being reliable, on showing up, on delivering the Great Indian Man, gave his eighth flop in ten releases.

People aren’t going to the movies anymore. India had 1.46 billion theatrical admissions in 2019. By 2025 that number was 832 million. Fewer than 150 million Indians go to a cinema even once a year. PVR INOX is closing over 130 screens. The audience didn’t stop loving stories, and consistent rise in OTT subs tells us that. They just stopped caring about the specific people the movie industry decided were worth caring about.

While all of this is happening, while the revenues are falling and the footfalls are tanking, the stars kept demanding more. Star salaries eat roughly 70% of production budgets before filming starts. Karan Johar said it best: “When the budget is 40 crore, you asked me for 40 crore.” Dharma Productions, the studio that basically defined Bollywood cool for twenty years, saw its profits fall 94.5% in one year. Had to sell a 50% equity stake. Meanwhile Maddock Films, which bets on content and not stars, is operating at a 20.9% profit margin.

And then there’s South Indian cinema, which Bollywood keeps framing as competition but is actually just a mirror. South Indian films earned more at the Indian box office than Hindi films in 2024. 31% of what Hindi cinema collected last year came from dubbed South Indian films. Worth noting that this trust collapse is specifically a Bollywood problem, not an Indian cinema problem. South Indian celebrities still move product in a way their Hindi counterparts increasingly don’t, because the movie industry they come from hasn’t broken the same promises. Pushpa 2 alone was 20% of Hindi box office. Aamir Khan actually said it correctly for once: South films do what Bollywood used to do. Big emotions. Mass appeal.

The nepotism piece ties all of this together. Over 30 star kids launched since 2015. Most of them flopped. The Archies. Janhvi Kapoor’s 0% success ratio for original Hindi releases in 2024. Most people would rather watch a star kid fail than succeed at this point, not because anyone wishes them ill, but because every failure is the audience saying: we see the game and we’re not playing.

When your product is this visibly rigged, when everyone can see who gets the roles and why, people stop trusting the whole ecosystem. And that trust collapse bleeds directly into endorsements.

Shah Rukh Khan selling Lux worked because of what Shah Rukh Khan meant. He was the middle-class Delhi boy with no filmy background, no godfather, no unfair advantage, no last name that opened doors. Just hunger and talent and charisma and a face the camera (sometimes) loved. He arrived in Bombay with nothing and became the Badshah. That story was the product. When he vouched for something, it carried the whole weight of that myth- the idea that this country rewards merit, that talent wins, that the dream is real and available and he was proof of it. You weren’t buying soap. You were buying into the promise he embodied.

The nepo era destroyed that foundational myth. It said: actually, last name wins. It said: the dream was always more access-restricted than we told you. And the moment that myth breaks, SRK’s origin story stops feeling like a promise and starts feeling like an exception. The dream curdles. The vouching stops working. The endorsement becomes just an ad. And we have plenty of those already.

Think about the last time a Bollywood star felt like someone you actually knew.

Take your time. I’ll wait.

Hard to place, right?

You can probably tell me their PR narrative, the humble origins story, the transformation arc, the carefully managed relationship timeline, the planted Reddit posts, the Viral Bhiyani placement. You know the version of them that lives in press junkets and magazine profiles and Instagram posts where the lighting is uniformly good and the caption is clearly written by someone else. But you don’t actually know them. And somewhere along the way, you stopped pretending you did. You stopped reaching for that feeling.

I noticed it happening to me in slow motion. I’d watch an interview and clock, almost immediately, which question had been pre-approved. I’d see a “candid” moment and mentally calculate the PR strategy behind it. I’d watch someone cry on a chat show and feel nothing, because I’d seen the same cry on three other chat shows and it had started to feel like a set piece. I’d watch someone look ‘shy’ about a relationship rumour and think, ‘eh, do you have. Movie coming out?’

Now think about the last creator who recommended something to you that you actually bought. Or changed your mind about something. Or taught you something. Or showed you a fun hack that kind of entered your life seamlessly. Or made you feel seen in a way you weren’t expecting from someone you’d never met.

Different feeling entirely.

It’s not that influencers are more honest. Some (most) of them are completely full of it. The gifted PR packages described as personal favourites, the “I’ve been using this for months” posted six days after the brand deal was signed, the wellness content that is essentially just selling you anxiety about yourself, the curated ‘Pinterest lifestyle’ that’s quite clearly a lie. The audience knows. They always know.

But even knowing all of that, the relationship still works in a way that the Bollywood endorsement doesn’t. Creators are accountable to their audience in a way that Bollywood stars simply cannot be. When a creator posts something their audience hates, they hear about it immediately in the comments, in the DMs, in the quote tweets, in the declining engagement numbers that their next brand deal depends on. The feedback loop is right there, visible, fast and merciless. It keeps them calibrated. Not honest, necessarily, but calibrated. They know where the line is because the line has been drawn for them in real time, repeatedly, by the exact people they need to keep trusting them.

Bollywood stars live inside an ecosystem specifically designed to protect them from that feedback. The PR teams, the interview pre-approvals, the curated access, the mythologising, all of it exists to create, curate, and manage distance. To keep the image intact. To make sure you never see anything that wasn’t meant to be seen. You were buying into the fantasy, and the fantasy required that you not look too closely.

The problem is that in 2025, looking closely is just what we do. We have parasocial relationships with people who post from their actual bedrooms. We watch someone process a breakup in real time. We see the bad skin days and the disagreements with brand managers and brands overreaching and the moments where someone is clearly exhausted and posts anyway because the algorithm punishes absence. We have been trained, by years of this kind of content, to identify intimacy. And once you’ve developed that muscle, the managed distance of a Bollywood star doesn’t feel aspirational anymore.

I think about the Clinic All Clear ad. Virat and Anushka, selling shampoo. It worked because people had a feeling about them; Years of match days, stolen glances, hands held at the airport, magazine covers and a wedding that felt like a national event. You weren’t buying shampoo. You were buying proximity to something you loved. The product was the feeling. But that machine doesn’t produce the feeling anymore. Not for everyone. Not for the generation that matters most to brands right now. They didn’t grow up with Virat and Anushka the way we did. They grew up with someone on their phone at midnight, showing them a skincare routine in bad lighting, getting into arguments in their comment section, recommending a serum they’d actually been using for six months before they mentioned it, who walked them through a crush-situationship-relationship-wegotengagedomg trajectory. That person is who they have feelings about. The kind that converts to sales.

Feelings aren’t transferable. You cannot buy someone else’s parasocial relationship and redirect it toward your product. The brand that paid ₹8 crore for a Bollywood face is paying for a feeling the audience may no longer have. The brand that paid ₹50,000 for a mid-tier creator is paying for a feeling that is very much alive, embedded in a relationship the creator has been building for years, that the audience shows up to voluntarily.

80% of Indian Gen Z trusts influencers over celebrity endorsements.

The last thing I’ll say here, and it’s the thing I feel most strongly about: I would rather patronise a rich influencer who owns their privilege than a Bollywood star performing middle class because they think it will make me like them more. At least the influencer isn’t lying to me about who they are. The performance of relatability is so much more insulting than just being unrelatable. One is a gap. The other is a con. The audience figured this out before the brands did. They always do. The brands are just now starting to follow the money.

Let’s talk about what a mid-tier influencer actually makes. My case study here is an influencer with 150,000 followers, posting consistently, monetizing reasonably well. She’s not a megastar. She doesn’t have some insane viral moments, maybe a few reels that breached 500k views. She is doing 2-4 brand deals a month at anywhere between ₹40,000 and ₹2 lakh per post. She can make ₹5-6 lakh a month on an average month. And, perhaps most importantly, that income has nothing to do with anyone else’s decisions. No producer greenlit it. No director cast her. No box office number validated it. No PR cycle generated it.

Now think about what a Bollywood star’s income actually depends on. A hit. Everything flows from the hit: the brand deals, the appearance fees, the magazine covers, the relevance. The hit determines the fee which determines the brand interest which determines the next hit’s budget. It’s a chain, and every link in it is someone else’s decision. The producer has to greenlight the film. The director has to cast you. The audience has to show up. The critics can’t destroy it opening weekend. The OTT deal has to come through if the theatrical doesn’t. At every stage, someone else holds the key. The Bollywood star is, structurally, dependent on external validation in a way that a creator with 150,000 engaged followers simply isn’t.

This is the thing that is genuinely underappreciated about the influencer economy. It’s not just that the money is good. It’s that the money is decoupled. An influencer’s income is a function of their own consistency. A Bollywood star’s income is a function of other people’s decisions. In an industry that is increasingly making bad decisions, that distinction matters enormously.

Micro-influencers in India deliver engagement rates of 4-8% on Instagram. Mega-celebrities deliver under 1%. The conversion rate gap is roughly 60% in favour of mid-tier creators when reach is comparable. The ROI is 4.2 times higher. And the cost differential is almost comical. A nano-influencer charges ₹500 to ₹5,000 per reel. A single ad film with an A-list Bollywood star costs ₹8-40 crore before you’ve spent a rupee on media. Hindustan Unilever is the number that ends the argument. In FY25, HUL increased influencer marketing spend by 40% while cutting total advertising expenditure. They went from 700 creator relationships to 12,000. Their chairman said it at the AGM: 40% of ad budget now goes to digital. Unilever’s global CEO said it even more plainly: he wants one influencer in every zip code in India. Not one Shah Rukh Khan. One person in each of the 19,000 zip codes across the country who the people in that zip code already trust.

The D2C brands made this move years earlier and have the valuations to prove it. Muuchstac was built entirely through micro-influencer campaigns, zero television, zero Bollywood and was acquired by Godrej Consumer for ₹450 crore. Godrej’s CEO called it the future model. SUGAR Cosmetics built its brand through 20,000 influencer partners, going from 2 products to 450 SKUs. boAt captured 32% of India’s earwear market. Co-founder Aman Gupta was explicit about why: their consumer doesn’t watch TV the way previous generations did. Mamaearth spent ₹744 crore on marketing in FY25, with influencers at the core of that spend, and built a listed company worth thousands of crores in the process. None of these brands were built on a Bollywood face. All of them were built on distributed trust at scale.

The celebrity endorsement isn’t dead, obviously. Virat Kohli’s brand value rose 21% after his 2023 comeback. Shah Rukh Khan’s brand value is not going anywhere immediately. But these are increasingly exceptional cases in an industry where the average is collapsing. The exception is being used to argue against the trend, and the trend is unambiguous. Celebrity-endorsed ad volumes declined 12% in the first half of 2025. Only 29% of ads now feature a celebrity at all. 47% of brands now prefer micro-influencers over celebrities and macro creators. The money is moving. It has been moving for a while. The only people who haven’t fully clocked it yet are the ones still pricing influencer agencies like PR firms with a social media tab open.

There's another cost nobody puts in the deck. A-list Bollywood celebrities are genuinely painful to work with, and the pain is a feature, not a bug. The entourage, the green screen requirement, the 30-minute window, the manager who is a nightmare, the creative restrictions that make a live location shoot essentially impossible, all of it is a pricing signal. If you're trying to move from ₹4 crore to ₹6 crore, making yourself harder to access is a legitimate strategy. You're not paying for the performance. You're paying for all the frills around it. And those frills put a ceiling on what the work can actually be. The best ad you can make with someone like that is maybe a 7 out of 10, because you're shooting on a green screen in a studio on their schedule. Meanwhile, a creator with a million followers will show up, have opinions, care about how it looks on their page, and make something better because their audience will judge them for it if they don't.

Think about what Farah Khan represents in the industry. She made Om Shanti Om. Main Hoon Na. Happy New Year. She is not a struggling director looking for relevance. She is someone who sat behind the camera for decades manufacturing the very star power we’re talking about. She choreographed the songs that made Shah Rukh Khan iconic, she directed the films that made Deepika a household name. She understood the machine better than almost anyone. And then she picked up her phone and started making reels about food and her kids and roasting her famous friends, and somehow that content is more engaging than anything she’s produced theatrically in years.

What Farah figured out, consciously or not, is that the thing audiences actually wanted was never the spectacle. It was the person behind the spectacle. The machine was so loud and polished for so long that nobody could hear the actual human being. The moment she stepped out from behind the camera and just started talking, there was an audience immediately there, waiting. They’d been waiting for years. They just had no way to access her.

Farah Khan choosing Instagram Reels over a film set isn’t a retreat. It’s an upgrade. The economics are better. She has a direct relationship with audience, no studio greenlight required, no box office pressure, no press junket where she has to be nice about a film she knows is mediocre. The creative control is better. The feedback is immediate. The shelf life, paradoxically, is longer, because she’s building a relationship rather than launching a product.

And she is not alone. Look at who is actually crossing over and in which direction. Prajakta Koli went from YouTube to Bollywood and OTT. Bhuvan Bam (26 million YouTube subscribers) is now doing critically acclaimed web series. Dolly Singh went from Instagram comedy to the Cannes red carpet. Kusha Kapila went from satirical Instagram sketches to film roles and reality TV judging. The creators are moving into film and television as a prestige play and as a way of adding range to an identity they already own. They’re not doing it for the money. They’re doing it because they can afford to.

The Bollywood stars going the other direction are doing it for completely different reasons. They need the recurring revenue. They need the direct audience relationship that their film careers used to provide and no longer do. They need a platform that doesn’t require a hit every eighteen months to justify their existence.

Alia Bhatt has a YouTube channel. 1.6 million subscribers. Kartik Aaryan has one. Around 619,000. These are not bad numbers for a regular person. For someone whose face is on billboards across the country, they’re humbling. Ajey Nagar, who started making videos in his bedroom in Faridabad, has 45 million YouTube subscribers. The gap isn’t about effort or even likability. It’s about where the relationship was built. Alia’s audience knows her through films, through a carefully managed public persona, through Karan Johar’s godfathering her, through her amorphous existence- Alia Bhat simply exists. CarryMinati’s audience chose him, repeatedly, over years, for all the good and bad he is. That kind of loyalty has to be earned from scratch.

The other thing that’s broken is the star-making machine itself. There’s no new Shah Rukh Khan because there can’t be. The conditions that produced Shah Rukh Khan don’t exist anymore. He arrived in an India with limited television, no internet, no OTT, no social media, an India where cinema was genuinely one of the few places mass culture was made. He became a fixture because the channels through which fixtureness was created were narrow, and he occupied all of them. Today those channels are infinite. Attention is distributed across millions of creators, thousands of platforms, billions of pieces of content. The kind of singular, total cultural dominance that made the Khans possible is structurally unavailable now.

There is no new bachcha being manufactured. And the ones being launched are being launched into an audience that has more options than any previous generation and is ruthless about exercising them. They don’t have to watch. So increasingly, they don’t. The shelf life of a Bollywood star in 2025 is short and getting shorter. The shelf life of a creator with a genuinely engaged audience is, if managed well, indefinite. Bollywood wants to become Instagram. Instagram has no particular desire to become Bollywood.

In 2015, influencer marketing was the experimental line item. The thing you tried with 5% of budget while the real money went to the TVC with the Bollywood star and the big media buy. Influencers were scrappy, unproven, and faintly embarrassing to take seriously. You had to convince your big boss that yes, the kid with a front camera can, in fact, sell things. The Bollywood endorsement was the signal that your brand had arrived. It was as much about the brand’s self-image as it was about actually selling anything. That logic hasn’t fully died. It should have, but it hasn’t. There are still marketing teams who greenlight a celebrity deal because it makes the board presentation look impressive, and because nobody ever got fired for hiring Shah Rukh Khan. The institutional safety of the celebrity endorsement outlives its commercial utility by years.

Celebrity endorsed ad volumes declined 12% in the first half of 2025. Only 29% of ads feature a celebrity now. 47% of brands prefer micro-influencers over celebrities. 70% of Indian brands are maintaining or increasing influencer spend. The influencer marketing industry is growing at 25% annually while the overall ad market grows at 10-12%. This is a reallocation happening in real time.

The framework I’d give any brand trying to figure out where to put their money is simple. Celebrity is renting a feeling. Influencer is renting a relationship. A feeling is a one-time transaction. You pay for it, it works or it doesn’t, it fades. A relationship compounds. Every piece of content a creator makes within an ongoing brand relationship adds to the trust that the previous pieces built.

Which doesn’t mean celebrities have no role. They do. One celebrity naam ke liye, for the press release, for the board, for the brand equity signal that still matters in certain categories and certain markets. And everyone else in the budget is an influencer. Not just because it’s cheaper, though it is, but because it converts. Because the 4.2x ROI differential is real. Because 60% higher conversion rates are not a rounding error. Because Muuchstac was acquired for ₹450 crore on the back of micro-influencer sales and zero television.

The mistake most brands make when they come around to this logic is that they try to use influencers like they used celebrities. One post. Big fee. Move on. It doesn’t work that way. The product is the relationship, which means the investment has to be in the relationship. You need longer partnerships, genuine integration, letting the creator actually talk about the thing in their own voice rather than handing them a script. The brands that have figured this out are treating creators as evangelists rather than as billboards.

The agency story I started with is the whole thing in miniature. A Bollywood-affiliated talent house looked at a creator business and saw a cheaper, smaller version of what they already do. They priced it accordingly. What they actually looked at was the future of how trust gets built, distributed, and monetised in this country, and they couldn’t see it because they’ve spent thirty years in an industry that runs on a completely different operating system. They will eventually overpay for something in this space. They always do. They’ll buy the wrong thing, or the right thing at the wrong time, or the right thing and then run it using the wrong frameworks. The world will move on.

Somewhere in a brand meeting this year, someone will approve a ₹20 crore campaign built around a face everyone recognises. The film will be shot beautifully. The lighting will be perfect, the edit tight, the music engineered to the nth degree. The media plan will be airtight. It will run exactly where it’s supposed to, at exactly the right frequency, and the numbers will look reassuring in the deck the next morning. The team will post about its success on LinkedIn. People will see it. They just won’t do very much about it.

And on the same day, in the same country, a girl will prop her phone up against a stack of books and film a 40-second video in bad lighting, explaining why she actually uses a product. She’ll ramble a little, correct herself midway, forget a word, laugh, keep going. The comments will fill up before she’s even done replying to the first few. Someone will ask a question she didn’t think to answer. Someone else will say they tried something because of her last video. A few thousand people will buy the product before the campaign even goes live.

No one will write a case study about that second moment. It won’t show up in a board presentation. It won’t feel as controlled or as certain in its success. But if you look closely at what actually happened, at what made someone pause, consider, and then act, it will be sitting there in plain sight, in a video that looked like it cost barely anything.

Grateful to Bhaktee Modgil and P.G. Aditya for feedback!