Veteran actor Mohsin Gillani has taken aim at the distributors, algorithms and marketing machinery he believes have hollowed out Pakistan’s entertainment industry from within, arguing that commercial pressures have increasingly taken precedence over creativity.
Speaking in a recent podcast, Gillani placed much of the blame for the decline of Pakistani cinema on the people who, in his view, turned filmmaking into a rigid formula rather than allowing writers and directors the freedom to create. “Distributors are the real culprits behind the downfall of our film industry,” he said.
“They dictated everything, saying you must cast Sultan Rahi with Anjuman and Mustafa Qureshi, add two rain songs, and three fight sequences.” Gillani argued that this formula-driven approach, imposed from outside the creative process, eventually drained the industry of its originality.
While Pakistani television has grown commercially and technically, Gillani said that “the growth has come paired with a worrying drift toward sensationalism”.
He linked the shift to marketing pressures that now influence scripts as much as writers do, with channels and producers, he suggested, increasingly prioritising social media reach and model casting over trained acting talent.
“Directors,” he said, “they are frequently pushed to insert specific scenes or storylines purely to chase commercial success, regardless of what the script actually calls for.”
Gillani also questioned why bold scenes had become so routine on screen. “Even real-life married couples don’t display everything publicly, so why project it on screen? Our dramas are rebelling against the minds of our children,” he said.
He attributed the trend to two forces: a regulatory body that he feels has become far less visible than it once was, and a social media ecosystem that rewards shock value. “This wretched social media feeds you whatever you want to consume,” he said. “When empathy leaves, and beastliness takes over, people lose sense of direction.”
Gillani turned his attention to the experiences of women working in the entertainment industry, arguing that the glamour associated with showbiz often obscures the challenges they face. “People only see the glamour, but they don’t realise what women in the media industry have to survive when they step out to act,” he said.
He was equally critical of the pressure on actors to take on bold scenes in order to keep pace with changing trends. Gillani suggested that the growing commercialisation of talent was reshaping the content being produced, raising concerns about what the industry was passing on to the next generation.
