Karan Johar calls Hindi cinema 'headless chicken' for taking bad masculinity cues from South's Arjun Reddy, Pushpa

Director, Karan Johar, acknowledged that the concept of heroes is now dwindling in Hindi cinema and said that the business is taking the wrong lessons from popular South Indian films. According to him, the filmmakers are making an effort to appease a growingly 'mad' audience. He also criticized the toxic masculinity shown in South Indian films and talked about how "Hindi cinema" is stuck in a "herd mentality" where viewers prefer strong, perfect men to weak, flawed ones.

Karan Johar stated that Hindi film has "derived violence from South cinema and this is not their core" in an interview with Nikhil Taneja on the We Are Yuvaa YouTube channel.

"Hindi cinema has no hero; the hero today is the film, and thank god for that. We don’t need a Vijay to save us or a Raj to rule our hearts. We need our content to be impressionable in a good way," he said.

When asked about the inherent violence that Hindi cinema sees in masculinity, Karan said, "Hindi cinema has derived this from South cinema. This is not our core being, this is our derivation. Suddenly now we are deriving it because KGF and Pushpa are big hits. And we’re deriving it in an inauthentic manner. South (filmmakers) have their own convictions and how they can pull it off, and that’s their strength. We don’t have that strength. We don’t know what we’re doing, me included. We’re all walking around like headless chickens trying to find our feet.”

"We don’t want to see soft characters anymore, we don’t want to see vulnerability, we don’t want to see flawed men, because the men in this country, generally, have gone back to being angry. But Hindi cinema hasn’t even got the anger right. Kabir Singh is Arjun Reddy, it’s not even authentically Hindi," Karan said.