3 min readMumbaiUpdated: Feb 22, 2026 01:30 PM IST
Ram Gopal Varma has been all praise for Aditya Dhar’s blockbuster spy thriller Dhurandhar, starring Ranveer Singh, ever since it release in cinemas last year on December 5. Now, he’s made his loyalties towards the film known yet again, ahead of the clash of its sequel, Dhurandhar 2: The Revenge, with Geethu Mohandas’ Kannada action epic Toxic: A Fairytale for Grown-Ups, starring KGF superstar Yash, a box office battle that RGV has titled ‘Dhuroxic‘.
The filmmaker on Sunday claimed that ‘Dhuroxic’ isn’t about “North vs South” or “Bollywood vs Sandalwood (the Kannada film industry)”, but between two cultures, “not of regions, but of cinema”. “The principal difference between the two is that #DHURANDHAR respects the audience’s intelligence and #TOXIC presumes their dumbness.”
He argued that Yash-starrer Kannada action franchise KGF aimed at “the dumbness in the masses” whereas Dhurandhar aimed at the “intelligence” in them, which led to it becoming a global success, even dethroning KGF: Chapter 2 (2022) worldwide to become the fourth highest grossing Indian film ever at the worldwide box office.
Ram Gopal Varma then listed “10 savage brutal truths” as points of comparison between Dhurandhar 2 and Toxic. One of them was “mindless hero worship vs the audience themselves discovering heroes through their moral actions in the story.” He claimed that while Toxic’s action sequences “mocked physics and insulted every school kid who studied Newton,” those in Dhurandhar were “so raw and real that one can actually feel the punches.”
He then argued that while Toxic’s background score screams “claps and whistle now, you idiots” to the audience every five minutes, Dhurandhar is steeped in “dead silence that lets brilliant performances do the talking.” He also claimed that Rs 700 crore has been spent on Toxic to make only one guy (Yash) look like an invincible God while only Rs 130 crore is invested in Dhurandhar to make every character “feel equally human/”
While Dhurandhar is headlined by Ranveer Singh, it also boasts of an ensemble cast, including Akshaye Khanna, Sanjay Dutt, Arjun Rampal, R Madhavan, Sara Arjun, and Rakesh Bedi, among others. RGV further unleashed his rant against Toxic, writing that Yash’s flying hair in the ultra slow motion hero entry shots look “straight out of a shampoo ad” and “vulgar budgets” have been wasted on “VFX fireworks, eyesore sets, and stars just to hide creative vacuum.”
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“A film that begs the audience to switch their brains off to enjoy it versus a film forcing you to think, feel, and question every frame,” pointed out Varma, adding, “Money being poured versus money being put to use.” He ended his post on X with a disclaimer that it’s not his love for Dhurandhar director Aditya Dhar which made him write the post, but his “hope for Indian cinema,” to know whether “India is Dhurandhar or Toxic.”
Ram Gopal Varma writes another long X post on Dhurandhar 2's clash with Toxic.