Shefali Shah will next be seen in Delhi Crime season 2. (Photo: Radhika Mehra)Actor Shefali Shah believes that the ongoing boycott campaigns being spun around Bollywood releases isn’t going to have ‘long-lasting’ impact on the industry. Several big-ticket releases such as Samrat Prithviraj, Laal Singh Chaddha and Raksha Bandhan have been hit by online boycott campaigns, and while the impact of such campaigns on the films’ box office is questionable, they have become a major talking point at a time when most big films are struggling to connect with audiences.
While promoting the upcoming second season of Delhi Crime, Shefali Shah was asked in an interview with India Today about cancel culture in Bollywood, and she said, “It’s a trend. I don’t think it’s long-lasting.”
Asked if there is actually a chance that Bollywood as we know it could ‘end’, she said, “I don’t think it’s possible. Films is a culture like cricket. It can’t die… it can’t. People have their point of view, they have their opinions, but there is also a lot of love and appreciation that we get. I think we should just take it in our stride and just say ‘we tried’ and we move on.”
Shefali said that the audience has always been ‘prepared’ for good content, and that perhaps the industry ‘underestimated’ their appetite. “We got stuck in a rut of what was required of Bollywood, of blockbuster films,” she said.
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The first season of Delhi Crime arrived in the initial wave of original streaming in India, and won an International Emmy. The hotly anticipated second season has reportedly had a rough road to release, but it’ll arrive on Netflix this Friday. The show gave Shefali’s career a new lease of life, and the actor has flourished in recent years. She was last seen alongside Alia Bhatt in Netflix’s Darlings, and before that, alongside Vidya Balan in Prime Video’s Jalsa.