Superboys of Malegaon · reception & legacy
2025 · Reema Kagti
How Superboys of Malegaon has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
It premiered at TIFF 2024 to warm reviews, then barely made a ripple at the Indian box office in early 2025 — before word of mouth and streaming turned it into one of the year's most beloved Hindi films, the classic 'nobody saw it in theatres, everybody vouches for it now' trajectory.
What's debated
The recurring debate is whether it improves on or merely Bollywood-polishes Faiza Ahmad Khan's beloved documentary Supermen of Malegaon, which told the real story first.
Its footprint
Vineet Kumar Singh's line 'writer baap hota hai' ('the writer is the father') became an instant rallying cry among Indian screenwriters and film Twitter, quoted in nearly every review and in the ongoing fight over writers' credit in Bollywood.
Where it stands
It slotted straight into the movies-about-loving-movies canon — a Letterboxd favourite that cinephiles hand each other as proof that films about why we make films still work.