Tigmanshu Dhulia has picked a fight with the internet, and the internet has shown up in numbers.

Speaking at an event organised by the Editors Guild of India, the Paan Singh Tomar director took aim at Dhurandhar, the film currently being treated as the biggest thing in Indian cinema this year. His problem wasn't with how it looked or sounded.

"By the way, I liked the first part of Dhurandhar, very well presented, engaging, good music," Dhulia said, according to 123telugu.com. "But if you ask someone to tell the story of Dhurandhar, no one will be able to tell you. A man who is undercover goes to Pakistan and wreaks havoc there. Is this even a story?"

That last line is doing all the damage online right now.

Dhulia didn't stop at one film. He argued that Hindi cinema has narrowed itself down to a single template lately, and reached for a phrase that's likely to outlive this news cycle: every big film today, he said, is basically a "fictional biopic." He named KGF, Dhurandhar and the Pushpa series in the same breath as evidence of the pattern. His diagnosis for why this keeps happening was blunt. He blamed what he called "extreme capitalism" in the industry, the sense that scale and spectacle now matter more than a script someone can actually retell in two sentences.

It's not a new argument. Filmmakers and critics have been making versions of it for years, watching a handful of pan-India hits reshape what gets greenlit. But coming from a working director, aimed at a franchise still riding a wave of goodwill, it landed differently.

The response was immediate and not gentle. Dhurandhar's fans flooded comment sections defending the film, arguing it has raised the bar for what Indian cinema can look like on this scale, and that Dhulia's comments read less like film criticism and more like sour grapes from someone who hasn't made anything of comparable size himself. 123telugu.com reported that several users called the remarks pure jealousy.

What's missing from all of this, is anyone actually defending the plot point Dhulia raised. Nobody in the pushback quoted so far has tried to walk him through the story beat by beat. The arguments have been about scale, craft and box office weight, not about whether an undercover operative causing chaos across the border amounts to a story with a shape.

Dhulia hasn't responded to the backlash as of this report, and it's unclear if he plans to. Dhurandhar's team has stayed silent too, which is probably the smarter move while a franchise this size is still printing money at the box office. Whether this becomes a proper industry debate about writing versus spectacle, or just another day of Film Twitter yelling at each other, depends on who picks up the mic next.