Sunny Deol who owns the Gadar franchise with the same solid grip as Arnold Schwarzenegger own the Terminator franchise, says he is still sorting out the enormity of the success. “When we were making it we knew it was either going to be rejected completely or it would become a massive success. No in-between kind of success for this. If young audiences had rejected the film(Gadar 2) for being too closely related to a film(Gadar Ek Prem Katha) that came twentytwo years ago, we would have been in trouble. Luckily for us,every generation of viewers ,even those who were not born when the first Gadar was released, have taken to the film as if they own it.”
Critic Raja Sen sees the stupendous success of Gadar 2 as a sign of the times. “We are in a time when audiences want to celebrate what they have already celebrated before : the films that are working are doing exactly what they promise on the label. Gadar 2 is the most effective kind of throwback that actually leans hard on nostalgia and uses characters and elements from the first film with affection, not irony. It harks back to cinema of a simpler time.. people are going to movie theatres in order, briefly, to time-travel.”
Critic Mayank Shekhar says, “Gadar 2 is essentially loud, earthy, angry-man movie, with a credible, relatable working-class hero, that audiences can repose their leap of faith on (something Bollywood stopped manufacturing, post ‘90s). The love for this genre, I suspect, never left Hindi film audiences. Only those movies did.”
Roshan Singh a prominent exhibitor in Patna is a diehard Gadar supporter. “In its third week,Gadar 2 did four times the business of Dream Girl 2 in its opening week. Gadar is beyond anything I’ve seen in my lifetime.”
