Hollywood, steered by Steven Spielberg, did it in the last millennium. But the rest of the movie-making world, especially India, which has emulated the West in most other genres, has not yet made a watchable creature adventure.
When Hollywood made its bunch of disaster films like The Towering Inferno and Earthquake (1974) with the enthusiasm of students experimenting with special effects, Hindi cinema tried to follow suit. But BR Films’ The Burning Train (1980), a multi-star disaster-action film, derailed so quickly that it was derisively referred to as The Turning Brain.
Surviving a disaster is a theme cinema has portrayed in different forms. Danny Boyle made 127 Hours (2010), the true story of a mountaineer who had a life-and-death canyon adventure. Similarly, we made films like Trapped (2016) in which Rajkummar Rao was locked up in an apartment without food or water. In Mili (2022), Jahnvi Kapoor nearly froze to death inside a freezer. But our most successful survival drama has been Laalo, 2025’s surprise blockbuster from Gujarat. Made on a budget of ₹50 lakh, it netted over ₹90 crore, rendering an unbelievable ROI of 18,010 per cent. It withstood even the Dhurandhar wave. It’s a simple story of a rickshaw driver locked inside a lonely farmhouse with no food or water, with Lord Krishna securing his release and redemption. It worked with a devout Gujarati audience but sank when a Hindi remake was made for a pan-India audience.
Therefore, like Hollywood, we have made our survival thrillers but what we haven’t been able to make so far is an edge-of-the-seat creature thriller. Spielberg introduced the concept way back with Jaws (1975) and Jurassic Park (1993) and for a while, killer sharks and dinosaurs provided frights and chills. Vikram Bhatt attempted it when he set Bipasha Basu and Pakistani actor Imran Abbas in the hospitality industry, put them in a way-out hotel in the jungle, created a man-eating menace and titled it Creature (2014). But even the novelty of a scaly killer that crawled couldn’t draw viewers and Abbas returned to his country, disillusioned.
Though they don’t qualify as creature thrillers, Hindi cinema has also experimented with werewolf stories. Mahesh Bhatt directed Junoon (1992), where Rahul Roy turned into a tiger on full moon nights. It was considered a cult film in its time. More recently, Dinesh Vijan made Bhediya (2022), where Varun Dhawan turned into a jungle-protecting wolf. It recovered its investment but was more a horror comedy than a creature thriller.
Maybe Soham Shah’s Luck (2009) with Sanjay Dutt, Mithun Chakraborty, Danny Denzongpa, Ravi Kishan, Imran Khan and Shruti Hassan was ahead of its time as Netflix’s global success Squid Game had more or less the same concept of death-defying feats involving mind games and deadly animals. But Luck, with bets placed on players who go underwater to challenge sharks and other creatures, had little luck at the box office. Whatever its fate, it was classified as an adventure and not a creature thriller like Jaws or Jurassic.
This makes Tu Yaa Main a rare genre for Hindi cinema. It is a creature thriller where the producers spent more on a crocodile than on the relatively unknown lead pair of Adarsh Gourav and Shanaya Kapoor. Much of the promotion also revolved around the croc.
A creature thriller is infrequently attempted in Hindi cinema. But one property no Hollywood, Korean or European film industry can compete with is our store of serpentine stories. Vyjayanthimala’s Nagin (1954), Reena Roy’s similarly titled Nagin (1976), Sridevi’s Nagina (1986) and Karan Johar-Kartik Aaryan’s soon-to-be-made Nagzilla spotlight the relevance of snakes in Indian society and beliefs. The West is welcome to its AI-generated dinosaurs. We make cinematic hiss-tory with our own creature thrillers.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and an author