Bajrangi Bhaijaan · reception & legacy
2015 · Kabir Khan
How Bajrangi Bhaijaan has been received, argued over, and remembered.
The arc
A monster hit and — rarer for a Salman Khan vehicle — a critical darling on release, it then got a whole second life in 2018 when China embraced it and turned it into one of the biggest Indian films ever released there.
What's debated
The perennial fan debate: is this the one Salman Khan film even Salman sceptics have to concede, and is its across-the-border sentimentality genuinely humanist or just very effective tear-jerking?
Its footprint
Nawazuddin Siddiqui's bumbling TV reporter riffs on a real viral clip of Pakistani journalist Chand Nawab, looping the meme back into cinema; add the 'Chicken Kuk-Doo-Koo' song and little Munni's face and you have a film that lives on in memes and reaction images across the subcontinent.
Where it stands
A modern Bollywood touchstone — the crowd-pleaser cinephiles actually admit to loving, and a fixture on 'best mainstream Hindi films of the 2010s' lists.