Shah Rukh Khan's film Ra.One, released in October 2011, arrived with the weight of expectation that attaches to a production on which the scale of ambition and the scale of marketing expenditure both broke records for Bollywood. Khan had spent years developing the project, positioning it as India's answer to Hollywood superhero cinema — a technologically sophisticated spectacle that would demonstrate that Bollywood could compete with global franchise filmmaking on production terms.

The result was spectacular in some senses and uneven in others. The visual effects work was genuinely impressive for an Indian production, representing a significant technical achievement that the industry acknowledged even as critics questioned the narrative coherence of the film surrounding the effects sequences. The action sequences drew favorable comparisons to their Hollywood equivalents. The emotional and comedic elements, which made up a substantial portion of the film's considerable runtime, were more divisive.

Khan's performance as Shekhar Subramaniam — a game designer who creates a villain more powerful than its hero, only to find the game's characters escaping into the real world — required him to play comedy and emotion before the superhero elements took over. The tonal shifts that resulted were characteristic of the masala formula that Bollywood had applied to every genre, including superhero films, and they were either charming or jarring depending on the viewer's relationship to that formula.

Ra.One ultimately confirmed both the ambition and the limitations of Bollywood's approach to superhero cinema. The ambition to compete on technical terms was credible. The question of whether the emotional grammar of the masala film was compatible with the structural logic of the superhero genre — a question the film raised without quite resolving — would continue to occupy Indian cinema's relationship with the format in subsequent years.