There are no capes from outer space in Bhavesh Joshi Superhero, only YouTube vigilantes, a stolen water supply and a hero invented, quite literally, in a comic book by a friend. The film flopped, then refused to die.
Bhavesh Joshi Superhero is a 2018 Hindi-language vigilante superhero action film directed by Vikramaditya Motwane under the Phantom Films banner, co-written by Motwane with Anurag Kashyap and Abhay Koranne. It stars Harshvardhan Kapoor in the lead, with Priyanshu Painyuli, Ashish Verma and Nishikant Kamat in supporting roles. It released theatrically on 1 June 2018, ran 153 minutes and was scored by Amit Trivedi.
The premise is deliberately small-scale. Bhavesh Joshi, Sikander Khanna and Rajat meet at an anti-corruption rally and start a YouTube channel called Insaaf TV, wearing paper-bag masks to expose everyday wrongdoing in their city. The threat they uncover is not a supervillain but a water mafia siphoning the municipal supply and selling it back to residents, a corruption grounded in real urban life.
Its superhero is rooted in comics within the story itself. When Siku takes up his dead friend's mission, another character accuses him of just wanting to be a hero like in the comics they read. By the end Siku adopts the identity of Insaaf-Man, a name and persona based on a comic-book superhero that the character Rajat invented, making the film's hero a literal product of homemade graphic storytelling.
The road to the screen was long. The project was announced around April 2014, originally simply titled Bhavesh Joshi. Imran Khan and then Sidharth Malhotra were attached to the lead before frequent pre-production delays led to Harshvardhan Kapoor taking the role. Principal photography ran from July 2016 to 30 May 2017.
Commercially it failed. Made on a budget of about 21 crore rupees, the film earned only around 2.52 crore rupees at the box office, a clear box-office bomb. Critics were mixed: on Rotten Tomatoes half of fourteen reviews were positive, with The Times of India giving it 3.5 of 5 and Hindustan Times calling it darker than any other Hindi superhero film, while NDTV and The Indian Express found it bloated and overlong.
The film travelled the festival circuit even as it struggled at home, screening at the Neuchatel International Fantastic Film Festival and being officially selected for the 2018 Bucheon International Fantastic Film Festival in South Korea, venues that prize genre and cult cinema. It later premiered on Netflix on 16 August 2018, where a second life began.
That second life turned it into a cult favourite. The film has since garnered a cult following built on its societal relevance and themes, with The Indian Express in 2023 describing how Motwane's overlooked gem became an entire generation's favourite cult film. The role also carried real-world weight, marking one of the final on-screen appearances of actor Nishikant Kamat before his death in 2020.
Within India's small canon of superhero films, Bhavesh Joshi argues for a different kind of hero: vulnerable, middle-class and morally exhausted, fighting municipal corruption rather than cosmic threats. Its comic-book framing, a vigilante literally drawn into being by a friend, makes it one of the clearest examples of Indian cinema engaging the superhero genre on grounded, graphic-storytelling terms.
Reported from Wikipedia and contemporary Indian film criticism.
