Bollywood hasn’t had a quiet week in a while, and July 2026 is no exception. Between a big-budget spy thriller, a genre-bending assassin drama, and a comedy sequel that refuses to slow down at the box office, the industry’s latest slate of new releases has given audiences plenty to argue about — and plenty of reasons to actually show up at theatres.
Alpha: A Female-Led Spy Universe Swings for the Fences
The most talked-about release this month is easily Alpha, Yash Raj Films’ first female-fronted entry in its long-running spy universe — the same franchise that gave the world Tiger, Pathaan, and War. Directed by Shiv Rawail and led by Alia Bhatt and Sharvari, the film arrived in theatres with the kind of anticipation only a YRF tentpole can generate, backed by a supporting cast that includes Bobby Deol and Anil Kapoor.
The premise has teeth: Bhatt plays Sita, a trained assassin raised and weaponised by her own mentor-father figure, played by Deol, and the film follows her attempt to bring him down. Sharvari’s Durga becomes the emotional counterweight, trying to pull Sita back from the void the character has been trained to become.
Reviews, though, have landed somewhere in the middle. Critics have praised the film’s stylish action choreography and a memorable Hrithik Roshan cameo, and there’s broad agreement that Sharvari holds her own impressively in a physically demanding role. But the screenplay has taken hits for uneven pacing, and even Bhatt’s performance — typically a safe bet — has divided opinion, with some viewers feeling her attempt at icy menace takes a while to land. It’s the kind of film critics describe as ambitious in concept but shakier in execution, which seems to be the fairest way to sum up the reaction so far. Commercially, though, Alpha has held its own comfortably against the competition, riding strong opening numbers and steady week-two footfalls.
Baby Do Die Do: Huma Qureshi’s Quiet Gamble Pays Off
If Alpha is Bollywood playing to its biggest strengths, Baby Do Die Do is the industry taking a genuine risk — and mostly winning. Directed by Nachiket Samant and led by Huma Qureshi, who also produces, the film centres on Baby Karmarkar, a deaf and mute contract killer working in Mumbai’s underworld for a father figure named Papa, played by Chunky Panday. The title itself is a play on her surname — Kar-Mar-Kar, or “do, die, do” — which tells you a lot about the film’s willingness to have fun with its own premise even as it deals in fairly dark territory.
What’s stood out most to critics isn’t just the novelty of a hitwoman protagonist who communicates without a single spoken line, but how grounded the film’s depiction of Mumbai’s contract-killing “supari” network feels — less glamorised underworld fantasy, more matter-of-fact business operating beneath the city’s surface. Qureshi’s performance has been singled out repeatedly as one of the strongest of her career, built almost entirely on expression and physicality rather than dialogue. The film isn’t without its flaws — the back half leans on a few too many characters and coincidences for some critics’ taste — but the consensus is that it’s a rare thriller willing to break from formula, and mostly succeeds because of it. Notably, the makers chose a theatrical release over a straightforward OTT drop, a decision that’s being read as a quiet vote of confidence in original, women-led stories still having a place on the big screen.
Dhamaal 4: The Comedy Sequel Nobody Bet Against
While Alpha and Baby Do Die Do have been fighting for critical column inches, Dhamaal 4 has quietly been doing the one thing that matters most to studios: making money. The Indra Kumar-directed comedy, featuring the returning ensemble of Ajay Devgn, Arshad Warsi, Riteish Deshmukh, and Javed Jaffrey, opened strongly and has kept climbing ever since, registering one of the biggest opening weekends of the year in Bollywood and quickly crossing the ₹100 crore mark in worldwide gross within days.
Reviews have been mixed at best — critics have generally called it a decent, familiar entertainer rather than anything groundbreaking — but that hasn’t dented its commercial run in the slightest. Strong family footfall, healthy occupancy across both multiplexes and single screens, and clean, broadly accessible humour have made it one of the more dependable performers of the year, climbing into the list of 2026’s highest-grossing Bollywood films.
A Slate That Reflects a Changing Industry
Taken together, these three releases paint an interesting picture of where Hindi cinema is right now. Alpha represents the big-studio bet on scale and franchise-building. Baby Do Die Do shows there’s still commercial room for original, star-driven stories that don’t fit a template. And Dhamaal 4 is proof that dependable, crowd-pleasing comedy remains close to bulletproof at the Indian box office, critical reviews notwithstanding.
None of these films are without their flaws, and audiences seem well aware of that — box office numbers and review scores this month don’t always move in the same direction. But that gap itself says something about Bollywood’s July slate: it’s busy, it’s varied, and for once, audiences have genuinely different reasons to pick which film they want to watch this weekend.view of how AI releases are going to feel from here on out — frequent, overlapping, and increasingly hard to keep up with.
