Hollywood is a ghost town, but Bollywood is a warehouse. Walk through the backlots of Mumbai and you’ll find plenty of high-definition footage sitting on expensive hard drives, chilling in climate-controlled rooms, doing absolutely nothing. It’s dead capital. Digital paperweights.

Vaani Kapoor is currently the face of this backlog. She has three films—Sarvagunn Sampanna, Raid 2, and Badtameez Gill—all finished, all polished, and all currently stuck in a distribution traffic jam that would make a Friday evening in Lower Parel look like a clear highway.

Making a movie is easy. Selling one? That’s where the bloodletting starts.

In the old days—about five years ago, which is a century in tech time—a finished film had a guaranteed path. You’d hit the theaters, get your ego stroked by a few billboards, and then dump the rights onto a satellite channel or a streaming giant to recoup the crumbs. But the math has changed. The "middle" of the market has fallen through a trapdoor. You’re either a 500-crore spectacle with enough CGI to melt a GPU, or you’re a micro-budget indie that wins a prize at a festival no one attends. Vaani’s slate sits right in that awkward, mid-budget danger zone.

Take Sarvagunn Sampanna. It’s a social comedy. In 2018, that was a license to print money. Today? It’s a risk profile that makes VCs break out in hives. Producers are staring at a 40-crore production cost and realizing they’d need to spend another 20 crore just on marketing to get people to put down their phones and go to a multiplex. The trade-off is brutal. If you spend the marketing money and the film tanks on Friday morning, you’ve doubled your losses by Sunday night.

So, they wait. They sit on the content, hoping for a "window." But windows in this industry are slamming shut.

Then there’s the streaming safety net. Or the lack of one. Netflix and Amazon used to be the industry’s giant, bottomless wallets. They’d buy anything with a recognizable face to pad out their libraries. Not anymore. Now, the streamers are behaving like grumpy accountants. They don’t want "content." They want "events." They’re looking for the next Squid Game or a massive franchise reboot. A mid-sized drama starring Vaani Kapoor doesn’t trigger the algorithm’s thirst anymore. The streamers are lowballing. They know the producers are desperate. It’s a Mexican standoff where the only thing dying is the film’s relevance.

Every month a film sits on a shelf, it loses value. Clothes go out of style. Jokes about trending topics stop being funny. Even the color grading starts to look "last season." Raid 2 has the benefit of being a sequel, which provides a bit of a brand cushion, but even that isn't a get-out-of-jail-free card. The audience's attention span has been eroded by 15-second vertical videos. If you aren't shouting, you're invisible.

The friction here isn't about talent. Vaani Kapoor can act, and she’s got the screen presence to carry a frame. The friction is the sheer cost of the "theatrical experience." When a family of four has to drop five thousand rupees on tickets and popcorn, they aren't looking for a "nice story." They want a religious experience. They want fireballs. They want 140 decibels of Hans Zimmer-style brass. If your movie features people talking in rooms—no matter how well-lit those rooms are—you’re fighting a losing battle against the couch.

Producers are also terrified of the "OTT tag." If they skip the theater and go straight to digital, the trade analysts label the film a failure before the first frame plays. It’s a vanity trap. They’d rather hold a finished film for two years, praying for a miracle theatrical window, than take a guaranteed check from a streamer and be labeled "Direct-to-Digital."

It’s a bizarre form of hoarding. We’re seeing a massive inventory of finished art being held hostage by a distribution model that’s effectively broken. Kapoor is just the most visible casualty of this pile-up. She’s done the work. The directors have yelled "cut." The editors have rendered the final files. Yet, these stories remain trapped in a digital Limbo, waiting for a market that no longer exists to suddenly reappear.

It’s not just about movies anymore. It’s about the brutal reality of the attention economy. Why pay for a ticket when the star’s Instagram feed is free?

How many more hard drives are we going to fill before someone admits that the theater isn't a church anymore, it's just a very expensive room?