The Film Federation of India has confirmed that Dhurandhar, Aditya Dhar's sprawling undercover crime saga starring Ranveer Singh, will not carry India's banner into the 2027 Academy Awards race. The decision, revealed as the federation finalised its submission slate, ends months of speculation that the year's most talked-about Hindi release would take the international stage. The film, which opened in theatres on December 5, 2025, was widely regarded as a frontrunner for the honour, making its omission the season's most debated snub.
Dhurandhar runs 214 minutes and was mounted on a scale rarely attempted in Hindi cinema, following an undercover operative who burrows into Karachi's criminal underground in the early 2000s, slowly earning the trust of a violent nexus before attempting to dismantle it from the inside. Dhar assembled an ensemble that reads like a roll call of the industry's most reliable performers: Ranveer Singh pulling double duty as Hamza Ali Mazari and Jaskirat Singh Rangi, Akshaye Khanna as Rehman Dakait, R. Madhavan as Ajay Sanyal, Arjun Rampal as Major Iqbal, Sanjay Dutt as SP Chaudhary Aslam, and Sara Arjun as Yalina Jamali. The supporting bench runs deep, with Rakesh Bedi, Danish Pandor and others filling out a narrative that spans borders, agencies and betrayals. Audiences responded warmly, and the film holds a 7.33 rating on TMDb, a solid figure for a release of this length and density.
The Selection Math Behind the Snub
Every year, the federation's selection committee weighs a crowded field, and the conversation around Dhurandhar reportedly centred less on its merits than on its category. The film's identity as an action-driven crime thriller worked against it in a room where voters have historically leaned toward dramas with overt social or humanist themes. The Academy's international feature branch has, in recent cycles, rewarded films with intimate emotional cores over large-scale genre entertainment, and that pattern shapes how India's submission is debated long before any ballot is cast. Sources familiar with the deliberations indicate that the committee questioned whether a 214-minute genre film could sustain momentum through the Academy's viewing process, where voters often screen submissions at home rather than in theatres.
Release Timing and the Campaign Question
Dhurandhar arrived in December 2025, which placed it comfortably inside the eligibility window but gave its backers a compressed runway to mount the kind of sustained international campaign that Oscar submissions increasingly require. Studios behind recent Indian entries have invested heavily in screenings, press outreach and festival positioning abroad, and the absence of a visible Dhurandhar campaign through the first half of 2026 raised eyebrows among awards watchers. The federation's final choice reflected a preference for a title whose distributor had already laid groundwork overseas, a practical consideration that has quietly decided more than one Indian submission in recent memory.
What This Means for Dhar and Ranveer Singh
For Dhar, the snub is a strange footnote on a film that has otherwise consolidated his reputation as one of Hindi cinema's most ambitious architects. His previous work demonstrated an appetite for research-heavy, politically charged storytelling, and Dhurandhar extends that impulse into outright genre territory. For Ranveer Singh, the dual role of Hamza Ali Mazari and Jaskirat Singh Rangi was positioned as a career-expanding performance, and missing the Oscar stage removes a platform that could have introduced his work to voters unfamiliar with his filmography. Neither the director nor the actor has issued a public statement, and the federation has not released a detailed rationale beyond confirming the film was considered and passed over. In trade circles, the prevailing view is that Dhurandhar will be remembered as a commercial and critical success regardless of the submission outcome - but the question of what might have been will linger through the 2027 awards season.
Source: Filmibeat
