Gurmmeet Singh On Mirzapur Movie's CBFC Cuts And Box Office

Gurmmeet Singh Says CBFC Treated Mirzapur As Pop Culture

The director tells Bollywood Hungama the board trimmed 35 seconds of intimacy and muted cuss words in four spots, but calls the process collaborative rather than combative.

By Call Sheet1 hour ago2 min read

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Thirty-five seconds of intimate scenes gone. Cuss words muted in four places, swapped out in six more. That's the tally Gurmmeet Singh confirmed to Bollywood Hungama when asked how the CBFC handled Mirzapur The Movie, the big-screen spinoff that's now crossed Rs 200 crore and is still running in theatres.

Singh isn't complaining. He says the board approached the film as a cultural artefact rather than just another certificate application. "They viewed it as a piece of pop culture and acknowledged that Mirzapur has its own legacy," he told the outlet, adding that the CBFC understood the franchise deals in adult themes and that audiences already know what they're signing up for. His read on it: despite the A rating, under-18 viewers still slip into halls across a country this size, so some trims were inevitable. He says the fun of the show, the swagger, the dialoguebaazi, survived intact anyway. And going by the box office, audiences agree.

The cuts are one thing. The bigger swing was visual. Singh wanted the film to look nothing like three seasons of television, so he leaned hard into the spaghetti western, specifically Sergio Leone's The Good The Bad And The Ugly. That meant extreme wide lenses, bigger set pieces, an opening action sequence in a spice factory shot so the colours of the spices scatter across frame, water and fire used liberally through the film. On writer Puneet Krishna's suggestion, the unit went to Jaisalmer and shot in the sand dunes to give the movie a texture the series never had. Even the structure changed: no chapters, no episodic breaks, just one continuous film built to be watched in a single sitting.

Then there's Babloo. Vikrant Massey played him across the show. For the film, Jitendra Kumar stepped in, arguably the toughest ask on the entire project since he's the only actor inheriting a role someone else built from scratch. Singh says Kumar made the transition easy on everyone, telling the team not to worry and that he'd find his footing on his own. Whether that footing actually landed is between Kumar and the audience, but the box office numbers suggest it worked.

One loose thread: Singh says he hasn't spoken to Massey since the film released and doesn't know if he's seen it. That's a conversation still waiting to happen, and probably one a lot of people are curious about.

As for what comes after Rs 200 crore, Singh isn't rushing to answer. He points out that the Mirzapur universe now carries more stakeholders than it used to, across the show and the film, and that the team is still inside its release month, waiting for the noise to settle before anyone commits to what's next. No timeline yet on a follow-up, no confirmation either way. For now, the film keeps running, and the numbers keep climbing.