Bollywood’s RTE misfired badly with films like Happy New Year or Dilwale (2015). They tried to reload the 90s formula, but the target had shifted. The new Indian audience was cynical. They had binged Breaking Bad and Sacred Games . They no longer believed that a man singing "I love you" on a balcony would solve a woman's career problems.
Shows like Made in Heaven , The Broken News , and Kota Factory present anti-romance. Here, the target is discomfort . The entertainment comes from watching arranged marriages fail or seeing the hero cheat.
Consider Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998). There is a basketball game (Brick) that is actually a flower delivery mechanism. The hero dunks to impress the heroine. The violence is aestheticized into romance.
Enter —the sniper rifle of Bollywood romance. Under Aditya Chopra and Yash Chopra, the studio refined RTE to a science.
The genre may mutate. The heroes may age. The heroine may now slap the hero instead of crying. But the formula remains eternal:
In the entertainment arms race, the Rom-Com is often called dead in the West. But in India, Romantic Target Entertainment is not just alive; it is reloading for the next blockbuster.
Bollywood is now desperately trying to reload this weapon. Pathaan and Jawan (Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback) succeeded by merging the "Bouquet" with the "Brick." They realized that modern RTE requires the hero to be a 57-year-old man doing pull-ups with a machine gun, while winking at the heroine. It is absurd, but the accuracy is back. The final frontier of Romantic Target Entertainment is the OTT space (Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar). Because OTT has no "interval" (the intermission that dictates the 90s masala structure), the rules of the target break.