Women take the wheel: Huma Qureshi and Shefali Shah declare OTT has broken Bollywood’s male-centric rulebook

Streaming has become Bollywood’s most disruptive force — and its most democratic. At the 10th edition of Expresso, actors Huma S Qureshi and Shefali Shah — who recently faced off in the latest Emmy-winning season of Netflix’s Delhi Crime — argued that OTT has shattered the long-standing belief that only male-driven projects guarantee success.

The new season pits a female police officer against a female human-trafficking mastermind, a tense power dynamic rarely seen on the big screen. But for the two actors, the bigger victory lies beyond the plot — it lies in the changing architecture of storytelling.

Huma didn’t mince words. “Platforms like Netflix are debunking this idea that only male-centric films sell,” she said, adding that audience data alone disproves the myth. “Shows like Delhi Crime or Maharani aren’t only watched by women — they’re watched and loved by everyone. The numbers speak for themselves.” She argued that if Delhi Crime were released as a theatrical film today, it would draw large crowds — not despite its women-led narrative, but because of it.

Yet she acknowledged that legacy barriers persist. “There are so many gatekeepers in cinema who bring a very traditional understanding of the business and a lot of bias. It takes a lot for things to change. But streamers like Netflix are definitely showing us the possibilities. Someday someone will finally look at that spreadsheet and say — we can do things differently.”

Shefali Shah echoed Huma’s sentiment and reminded audiences that Bollywood hasn’t always been this limiting. “In the ’60s and ’70s, women carried films — Aradhana, Amar Prem, Ghar, Guide, Aandhi. Then came a phase where the woman became an accessory. You just had to be tall, pretty, thin, and between 18 and 25, if you were lucky.” It was OTT, she said, that restored dignity and dimension to female characters — and to countless talented actors across gender and age.

Shefali pointed to names that finally got their due because streaming opened doors that films repeatedly shut: “Nawaz, Jaideep, Rajkummar Rao, Vijay — they’re brilliant and they finally got the opportunities they always deserved. OTT didn’t just change things for actors — it changed things for writers and directors too. Stories that would’ve been dismissed as non-viable for theatres now have a home.”

Together, the two actors framed a pivotal transition: streaming isn’t just expanding creative boundaries — it’s redistributing power. And as the appetite for women-led storytelling grows, Bollywood’s long-standing belief that “men fuel the box office” is beginning to look less like a rule and more like a relic.