Gold

The 1948 London Olympics. India has just won independence, Partition has cut the country and the hockey squad in half, and a team manager named Tapan Das is trying to assemble a side that can win gold under an independent Indian flag. India had already won three Olympic hockey golds, but every one of them as a British colony. Reema Kagti directs, with Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani producing. Akshay Kumar plays Das, alongside Mouni Roy, Amit Sadh, Kunal Kapoor, Vineet Kumar Singh and Sunny Kaushal. Tapan Das never existed. He is a composite, and the players around him are renamed too. So the film rests on a real event while refusing to use the real names: Balbir Singh Sr. and Kishan Lal, the actual stars of that 1948 team, walk through the picture under other identities. It opened on 15 August 2018, India's Independence Day, took over 250 million rupees on its first day for the third biggest opening of the year, and finished at roughly 1.58 billion rupees. Its most measurable effect was not commercial. Interest in hockey in India rose noticeably after release, in a sport that had spent decades losing ground to cricket. Who it is for: viewers who want a sports picture wrapped around the birth of a nation. Who it is not for: anyone after historical accuracy. The film puts an invented hero in front of a real team, and dramatic convenience wins nearly every argument with the record.