‘Fighter wasn’t a commercial war film’: Siddharth Anand defends film’s mediocre box office performance, says it ‘appealed to a limited audience’ | Bollywood News
3 min readChennaiFeb 11, 2026 09:39 PM IST
Filmmaker Siddharth Anand is credited with helming hit action films like Hrithik Roshan’s War and Shah Rukh Khan’s Pathaan. The director has once again reunited with SRK for his upcoming film King. However, in his filmography, the one film that released amid high expectations to mint big money but underperformed was the 2024 release Fighter, which brought together two of the industry’s most glamorous stars — Hrithik Roshan and Deepika Padukone.
In a recent interaction, Anand spoke about Fighter’s failure at the box office and explained how the film was made for a niche audience and wasn’t a typical “commercial war film”.
Speaking to Variety India, Siddharth said, “When I look back at it now, I look back at it dispassionately. I still see Fighter as being one of my best films. If I have made nine films, including King, it’ll be in the top three films of my filmography. I’m very proud of it and really amazed at the work that went into it. I’m amazed at how that film shaped up and what it is from a quality perspective.”
Siddharth shared that the massive success of his 2023 film Pathaan, which marked Shah Rukh Khan’s comeback to films after a break of four years, changed the nature of box office expectations, and Fighter was unfairly compared to the SRK-starrer. “Now, we obviously had a lot of expectations because the nature of the box office changed post- Pathaan. And once you give a film like Pathaan, the box office of Fighter does seem like ‘Oh, it didn’t perform to that level.’ But each film has its own destiny. And I feel a film like Fighter appeals to a smaller cross-section of people than Pathaan,” he said.
Arguing how Fighter wasn’t a commercial war film, he said, “It is, I would say, not niche, but a film that is talking of a genre which is very nascent, very new and actually never done before. It’s not a commercial war film.”
He added, “It’s about the Air Force and their lifestyle, their journey and what they do in their downtime, how they react, how they are in their dorm, how they are in their backyard at home, and how they prepare themselves to be fighters. It’s a film that I think appealed to a limited audience. And within that, the business that it did is remarkable. It got that respect with that number. I think it did what it was destined to do.”
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According to Sacnilk, Fighter collected Rs 358.83 crore worldwide against its reported budget of Rs 250 crore. The film was criticised for its weak VFX and flimsy storyline. Pathaan, on the other hand, was one of the first biggest hits after the pandemic. The film raked in Rs 1055 crore worldwide, marking Shah Rukh Khan’s powerful comeback at the box office.
