Neeraj Pandey didn’t set out to top Netflix’s non-English global charts. In fact, the Indian filmmaker behind ‘Tuskali: Smuggler’s Web’, whose credits include ‘Wednesday’, ‘Special 26’, ‘Baby’ and the blockbuster biopic ‘MS Dhoni: The Untold Story’, says he didn’t even know such a category existed.
“When I’m making a show, I don’t think about these things,” Pandey told Variety in a conversation in London, where he was scouting locations for his new movie. “I didn’t even know the concept that there was a category other than English.”
The seven-episode crime thriller “Taskali”, which follows an Indian customs team battling an international smuggling syndicate at Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj International Airport, traces its origins to a casual conversation between Pandey and former assistant director Tinu Suresh Desai (now an independent director) around 2021 or 2022. That conversation led to an encounter with Sumit, a customs official. Sarkar’s candid insights into how smuggling networks and customs operations really work became the backbone of the series. “I learned things I never could have imagined,” Pandey said, adding that he believes the uniqueness of the show is exactly what connects it with viewers.
The script was co-written with Vipul K. Rawal and took the best part of a year to a year and a half to complete. Netflix was an early participant, and the streamer expressed enthusiasm from the first pitch. The series, which also stars Sharad Kelkar, Amruta Khanvilkar, Zoya Afros, Nandish Sandhu and Anurag Sinha and was co-directed by Raghav M. Jairat, reached number 1 on Netflix’s list of non-English TV shows worldwide.
Casting Emraan Hashmi in the lead role was a deliberate act of reverse programming. “No one has ever seen him play a role like this,” says Pandey. “He was good at doing things that were completely different from what you would normally imagine.”
Like its predecessor, “Khakee,” “Taskaree” was always envisioned as a multi-season franchise. Pandey is a strong believer in the long-form model enabled by streaming. “You can move to a longer format throughout the season, and then even longer format,” he says, noting that the freedom to tell five to six hours of story in a single screening is something that movies can never offer.
‘Khaaky’ Pandey’s acclaimed Netflix anthology series began with a similarly unlikely encounter. This time we meet Amit Lodha, an Indian police officer. He approached Pandey as a fan and ended up narrating the story that became “Khaakhi: Bihar Edition.” Pandey encouraged Rhoda to write the story as a book, even promising to buy the rights before she put a word to paper. Lodha’s resulting book ‘Bihar Diary’ formed the basis of the first season.
The second film, ‘Khakee: The Bengal Chapter’, is a complete work of fiction rather than an adaptation of the real world, and was a hometown for Pandey, who was born and brought up in Howrah, West Bengal. Season 3 is currently in production, returning to the series’ roots with a story once again based on real police officers, and Pandey declined to divulge further details. “It’s still a work in progress,” he says.
Pandey’s other leading streaming property, ‘Special Ops’, was born in 2018-19 out of conversations with broadcasters who wanted content from then streamer Hotstar (now known as JioHotstar). The ambition of this show was clear from the beginning. The show was shot across the globe and broke new ground for streaming content in India in many ways. When production on the entire second season was curtailed due to COVID-19, Pandey released a four-episode prequel, Special Ops 1.5: The Himmat Story, to meet the demand of the show’s fan base. This was followed by “Special Ops 2” on JioHotstar in July 2025. “We strive to tell bigger stories, better stories every season,” Pandey says.
While Friday Storytellers, the digital arm of Friday Filmworks, the film production company Pandey co-founded with Shital Bhatia in 2008, has dominated the streaming world, Pandey is now making a big move toward theatrical releases. The company has said it has five Hindi films lined up over the next three years, some of which have been in development over the past year and a half to two years. Two productions are scheduled to begin this year, the first of which will be directed by Pandey himself, while the director of the second has not yet been announced. At least one project in the pipeline is scheduled for major worldwide release and will be dubbed into English.
He is also bullish about the outlook for the Hindi film industry as a whole. Pandey predicts that 2026 could surpass 2025 and that theater attendance could eventually return to pre-pandemic levels. “We really hit rock bottom. There was no way we could go any further down,” he said, adding that he has held this view since last year, saying the industry’s recent trajectory is an inevitable part of its cyclical nature. “Personally, I feel that 2026 will be that year.”
He pushed back on the idea that only big productions could succeed at multiplexes. “It’s not just event films,” Pandey said. “We’ll also probably see movies that are smaller but have big ideas, or what we call ‘little big movies.’ ” He cited the Malayalam film industry’s content-first approach as a model that Hindi films could eventually reach, and acknowledged that building such audience trust is a long game. “It takes years to harvest,” he says. “The fault lies with creators and producers who tend to think they know what their audience wants. Audiences are diverse. Why would they want to see something predictable?”
Ever since the interview was conducted, Pandey has found himself at the center of a significant controversy. The trailer of the Manoj Bajpayee starrer, released as part of Netflix’s 2026 India slate and titled ‘Ghoosko Pandat’, sparked an immediate backlash, with petitioners claiming that the combination of the caste-related term ‘pandat’ with ‘Ghoosko’, which means bribe-taker, constitutes a derogatory stereotype targeting the Brahmin community. The dispute escalated to the Supreme Court, after which Pandey admitted that the title had been withdrawn and all promotional materials removed, but a new title has not yet been announced.
Pandey did not comment when asked by Variety about the biopic on legendary composer Rahul Dev Burman.
