Two of the most talked-about Indian films of the last year had a fraction of the marketing spend of their blockbuster neighbours — and outperformed expectations by a wide margin.
What they shared was clarity of intent. Both told small, specific stories with enormous emotional range, and both trusted their audience to keep up.
The lesson is not that budgets do not matter. It is that a film people genuinely want to recommend will always travel further than one they were merely told about.