Animal

The story

"Animal" follows Ranvijay "Vijay" Singh (Ranbir Kapoor), the volatile, adoring, dangerously obsessive son of steel tycoon Balbir Singh (Anil Kapoor). Starved of his workaholic father's attention as a boy, Vijay grows into a man whose love curdles into something feral. When an assassination attempt nearly kills Balbir, Vijay returns from abroad and unleashes a scorched-earth war of vengeance that pulls in his wife Geetanjali (Rashmika Mandanna), a rival clan, and a near-silent, terrifying adversary named Abrar Haque (Bobby Deol).

At heart the film is a three-hour-plus meditation on fathers and sons dressed up as a blood-soaked crime epic. Director Sandeep Reddy Vanga frames Vijay's savagery as the wound of an unloved child, an interpretation many viewers found electrifying and just as many found indefensible. Triptii Dimri appears as Zoya in a pivotal late stretch, and a post-credits sting introduces a second Ranbir Kapoor character, setting up a promised sequel.

Making of the film

Vanga, who had already courted controversy with "Arjun Reddy" and its Hindi remake "Kabir Singh," wrote, directed and edited "Animal" himself, working from a screenplay co-credited to Pranay Reddy Vanga and Suresh Bandaru. Backed by T-Series, Bhadrakali Pictures and Cine1 Studios on a reported budget of around 100 crore, the shoot sprawled across Manali, Mumbai, Delhi, Punjab, England and Scotland.

The film's most infamous quality is its length. At roughly three hours and twenty-one minutes it stands among the longest mainstream Hindi films ever released, and Vanga's first assembly reportedly ran even longer before it was trimmed for cinemas. The production leaned hard into spectacle: the art department famously built an enormous, functional machine-gun prop for the climactic showdown, complete with thousands of dummy bullets manufactured by a large crew.

The music

The soundtrack, released by T-Series, became a phenomenon in its own right, drawing on a small army of composers including Pritam, A.R. Rahman, Vishal Mishra, Shreyas Puranik and Harshavardhan Rameshwar. "Satranga," composed by Shreyas Puranik and sung by Arijit Singh, and "Papa Meri Jaan," a father-son ballad voiced by Sonu Nigam, became instant favourites, while the Punjabi war-cry "Arjan Vailly" scored the film's rampages.

The breakout, though, was "Jamal Kudu" — a reworked version of an old Iranian wedding folk song — which soundtracks Bobby Deol's entrance. His dance of balancing a glass on his head, reportedly drawn from his own Punjab memories, turned into one of the most imitated moments of the year. The album briefly topped global streaming charts and gave the film a cultural footprint far beyond its plot.

Box office and records

"Animal" was a commercial juggernaut. It posted one of the biggest opening days in Hindi cinema and went on to gross in the region of 900 crore worldwide, ranking among the highest-grossing Hindi films of all time and comfortably becoming Ranbir Kapoor's biggest earner to that point.

Crucially, it achieved this despite an adults-only "A" certificate, which normally caps a film's reach — at release it stood as the highest-grossing A-certified Hindi film, a genuine record given how much of the family audience such a rating shuts out. It also secured an unusually wide overseas footprint, screening in hundreds of North American theatres.

Why it divided everyone

Few recent Bollywood films have split audiences and critics as sharply. Admirers hailed Ranbir Kapoor's ferocious, career-stretching performance, Bobby Deol's chilling comeback and Vanga's operatic staging; detractors condemned the film as a glorification of toxic masculinity, its treatment of women, and its relentless, graphic violence. Some reviewers named it among the year's worst even as audiences pushed it past milestone after milestone.

Awards bodies largely came down on the side of the crowd. "Animal" led the nominations at the 69th Filmfare Awards and won a clutch of trophies, including a fourth Best Actor prize for Ranbir Kapoor. Whatever one makes of it, the film reset the conversation about how far a mainstream Indian star vehicle can go — and a sequel, "Animal Park," has been confirmed, with Kapoor set to return.

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