September 18. That's the date Netflix has locked for Lust Stories 3, and the anthology has completely swapped out its directing bench for this round.

Gone are the names from the first two editions. In their place: Vikramaditya Motwane, Kiran Rao, Shakun Batra and Vishal Bhardwaj, four filmmakers with not much in common stylistically, each handling one standalone segment on love, desire and the things people won't say out loud. RSVP and Ashi Dua's Flying Unicorn Entertainment are producing again, with Ronnie Screwvala and Dua both credited as backers of the franchise since it began.

The cast list is stacked. Radhika Apte, Konkona Sen Sharma, Aditi Rao Hydari, Radhika Madan, Vijay Varma, Abhishek Banerjee, Siddharth, Ali Fazal and Gurfateh Pirzada all feature across the four films, though Netflix hasn't said who's in which segment or what any of the four stories are actually about. That's standard practice for this franchise. Nobody knew the plots going in for the first two editions either.

A newcomer walks in

The one genuinely new name here is Sana Thampi, a model from Kerala making her acting debut in Kiran Rao's segment, opposite Gurfateh Pirzada. For a franchise that's mostly recycled recognisable faces across its runs, slotting in a first-timer under a director as exacting as Rao is a notable bet, and it's the detail worth watching once the trailer drops.

Motwane, Rao, Batra and Bhardwaj haven't just directed their segments, they've written them too, alongside a bigger writers' room that includes Tanaji Dasgupta, Avinash Sampath, Sumukhi Suresh, Sameeha Sabnis, Ashwathi Namboodiri, Nitesh Bhatia and Utkarshini Vashishtha.

What the makers are saying

Netflix India's Ruchikaa Kapoor Sheikh framed the pitch around reinvention. "Each chapter begins with a shared human impulse and arrives at a completely different emotional truth," she said, describing the four films as circling around "power, vulnerability, agency, compromise, and the things people struggle to say aloud."

Screwvala called the anthology one that has "challenged conventions" edition after edition, and said the franchise keeps tracking how relationships and intimacy actually look now rather than staying fixed to its 2018 origins. Dua echoed the same point, saying every story in the collection carries its own tone but the same honesty running under it.

The lineage this joins

Worth remembering what this anthology has already pulled off. The 2018 original, with Karan Johar, Zoya Akhtar, Anurag Kashyap and Dibakar Banerjee splitting the segments, picked up an International Emmy nomination and got talked about for how bluntly it handled female desire on a mainstream Indian platform. The 2023 sequel brought in R Balki, Konkona Sen Sharma, Sujoy Ghosh and Amit Ravindernath Sharma, and found its own audience without repeating the first film's shock value.

Whether four directors this different in temperament, Motwane's restraint against Bhardwaj's darker instincts against Batra's relationship dramas against Rao's more observational eye, actually cohere into one anthology is the real question hanging over September 18. Netflix isn't giving anything away before then.