Half-finished films, cancelled releases, derelict theatres, careworn studios, a desperate workforce scraping together a living—the pandemic sucked the breathing life out of Bollywood in 2020. The annus horribilis spread its stain with the nationwide lockdown, when everything went into a catatonic state, and held on to its ghastly inertia. The financial losses for the Hindi film industry were monumental: hundreds of crores of rupees. Digital platforms such as Amazon Prime Video and Netflix emerged as viable, ‘at-home’ options, but could scarcely fill the void.