Vidya Balan said that even though Mission Mangal included five noticeable female on-screen characters, after the day, it was seen as ‘an Akshay Kumar film’.

Performing artist Vidya Balan talked about the 2019 film Mission Mangal in an unused meet. Vidya said that the film which highlighted Vidya together with the other four female performing artists was called an ‘Akshay Kumar film’ whereas the other female cast was not seen as the film’s lead.

Mission Mangal starred Vidya Balan, Sonakshi Sinha, Taapsee Pannu, Kirti Kulhari, Nithya Menen and Sharman Joshi, apart from Akshay Kumar. The film, based on India’s first Mars mission, made around ₹300 crores worldwide.

She said, “The widespread has ended up a straightforward pardon for individuals to say that presently female-led films will not work within the theatres, since essentially, our industry is going through a few kinds of flux where a part of our movies are bombarding, appallingly. And they are your so-called, male hero-led movies. But who takes the beating is the female-led movies. Do you not figure it out that Gangubai Kathiawadi had no man initiating it, it was Alia Bhatt. That film has done extraordinary numbers compared to a part of other movies with male heroes. It’s exceptionally baffling since there’s no rationale to it.”

She included, “For illustration, indeed a film like Mission Mangal, which did awesome, at long last it’ll be seen as an Akshay Kumar film, which is exceptionally disastrous. It’s not Akshay Kumar and five other driving women, since we’re not being seen as having driven the film in any way. But the story couldn’t have been told with fair Akshay Kumar, and it wasn’t told with fair him. Someday was talking to me around my final hits, and they didn’t say Mission Mangal, and they said, ‘Woh toh Akshay Kumar…’ and I was like, ‘Did you not see me and four other female actors?’”

Vidya said that the financial matters of female-led movies are distinctive since they fetched much less than male-driven blockbusters. She said that indeed her ‘worst flops have made more money’, in terms of proportions and return-on-investments, than a few of the major bombs of this year.