Stardom is one of the clearest indicators of an entertainment industry’s long-term health. Big stars do more than just open films. They create aspiration, continuity, and cultural memory. They help audiences form lasting emotional relationships with the industry itself, not just with individual titles. They also give producers the confidence to back ambitious films, new genres, and large-scale theatrical bets. Therefore, a healthy star system is not just about fame. It is about sustainability. One way to assess the health of the talent pool in any industry is to look at the average age of the top stars in the industry.

Ormax Stars India Loves (OSIL) is monthly star popularity track for Indian film stars in the theatrical market. While the track is now conducted in various languages (including a pan India version), the Hindi version was the original one, launched way back in 2010. This analysis on OSIL (Hindi) data reveals interesting, and worrying, insights about the health of stardom in the Hindi film industry.

How does Ormax Stars India Loves (OSIL) work?

OSIL is based on an audience survey that runs through the year. The survey samples regular theatre going audience across India, with a monthly sample size of 8,000+. Audience are asked to name their two favorite male stars and two favorite female stars in each language they watch films in. This data is analysed separately for male and female stars, and separately for each language.

Analysis approach

The analysis that follows is limited to Hindi film stars. Two data points have been considered: 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2025 (post-pandemic). For each year, the list of the Top 5 Hindi male and female Hindi stars was created, based on their popularity share averaged over the 12 months of the respective years. The average age of these Top 5 stars has been used as the analysis parameter. Age of the respective stars as on June 30 in the two years was considered to calculate the average age.

An aging star ecosystem, especially among male stars

The chart below highlights the average age of the Top 5 male and female stars in the respective years.

The average age of the Top 5 Hindi film stars in 2025 was 54 years, up from 47 years for the Top 5 in 2019. For the female stars, the Top 5 average at 37 years in 2025, compared to 33 years in 2019.

The data for the male stars points to a clear pattern. The average age has risen not because audiences have shifted towards older stars. It has increased because the top layer has remained largely unchanged, and they have grown older over these six years. In 2025, the Top 5 male stars were Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, Hrithik Roshan, and Ranbir Kapoor (in rank order), while the 2019 list featured Akshay Kumar, Salman Khan, Ranveer Singh, Hrithik Roshan, and Shah Rukh Khan, i.e., four common names in the two lists!

In the short term, this may not seem like a crisis. Shah Rukh Khan, Salman Khan, Akshay Kumar, and Hrithik Roshan still carry significant awareness and cultural heft. But in the long term, this inertia in popularity data is unhealthy, if not dangerous, for the industry. A star system cannot remain frozen in time. As these four stars age further, a vacuum will inevitably emerge, and if the next line has not been built by then, the industry is bound to face structural weakness.

This becomes even more important when one considers that the theatrical audience is young-skewed, with 57% of Hindi box office being contributed by those in the 15-30 years age group, as revealed in our latest report title The Ormax Bollywood Audience Report (TOBAR) 2026.

This creates a mismatch between the audience, their evolving aspirations, and the kind of stories that premier male talent can convincingly headline. When top stars are mostly in their late 40s, 50s, and 60s, some genres naturally become harder to mount at scale. Romance, romcoms, and coming-of-age stories then appear to be declining genres, but that diagnosis is often misleading. The problem is not the genre appeal at all. It's simply the absence of young top-tier stars who can make these genres feel aspirational and event-worthy again. Every film industry needs older stars at the top, but it also needs younger stars steadily rising beneath them. That is what keeps the ecosystem dynamic, future-facing, and creatively broad.

The female stars analysis suggests a similar issue, though to a lesser extent. The top five female stars in 2025 also overlap significantly with 2019, which suggests that renewal has not been especially strong here either. Alia Bhatt, Deepika Padukone, Shraddha Kapoor, Katrina Kaif, and Kriti Sanon hold the Top 5 positions in 2025, compared to Deepika Padukone, Alia Bhatt, Katrina Kaif, Kareena Kapoor Khan, and Shraddha Kapoor in 2019. Like the male stars list, there are four common names. On the brighter side, unlike the male stars list, there's definite emergence of younger female stars, such as Kriti Sanon (in the Top 5 in 2025), Kiara Advani, and Rashmika Mandanna, or even fresher faces like Aneet Padda, who can potentially move into more prominent positions over time.

What does this mean for the future of Hindi theatrical business?

Sports has shown how important renewal of the star ecosystem is. Football needed Ronaldo and Messi, but as they moved toward the end of their era; the sport actively began building names like Mbappe and Haaland, even if that transition is still incomplete. Tennis handled this better, moving from Federer and Nadal to Alcaraz and Sinner with much greater success. Indian cricket is also feeling this challenge now that Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma are less central than before. Even advertising still leans heavily on Kohli, Sharma, Tendulkar, and Dhoni, suggesting newer icons have not fully taken their place.

The data highlights Bollywood's talent development problem. Many major production houses now have talent management arms as a part of their attempt to vertically integrate, but the effort often seems geared toward PR maneuvering, visibility management, and short-term positioning. What is needed instead is a strategic approach to building durable stars through the right scripts, genre choices, screen image development, and long-term career planning (read more about our tool Ormax Star Image Pulse here).

That is the real need of the hour. Not just tactical movement, but deliberate star creation. It can be argued that in the age of social media, it may not be possible to match the stardom of the stars from the 1990s. But this data is not comparing their stardom in the 90s to that of their equivalents today. It's simply telling us that even today, the most popular stars are from the 90s, and ageing.

A film industry can survive temporary weakness in content, execution, or roller-coaster box office cycles. But an industry that stops producing stars is eventually weakening its own future. And Hindi cinema faces this very real problem today.