The problem with wanting Cocktail 2 to be a lesbian love story so badly

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Bollywood peaked in the 2000s and has, for close to a decade, not recovered from the ensuing slump. With the monopoly of streaming platforms and the Central Board of Film Certification (CBFC) growing stricter about what gets chopped at the editing table with every passing year, sequels—or as the internet calls it, ‘reheating nachos’—have ostensibly become the safest path to producing a blockbuster in this economy. The latest in a string of ‘follow-ups’, including De De Pyaar De 2, Son of Sardar 2, Baaghi 4, War 2 and Metro... In Dino, which all hit theatres last year, not to mention the upcoming Welcome to the Jungle, is Cocktail 2, featuring Kriti Sanon, Rashmika Mandanna and Shahid Kapoor.

Centred on a similar love triangle as the original starring Deepika Padukone, Diana Penty and Saif Ali Khan, but with higher stakes and a marriage in the mix, the film offers an updated take on the evergreen ‘two-girls, one-boy’ trope. Love triangles have always been a popular Bollywood genre, and when done well, can bring both thrill and pathos to a run-of-the-mill rom-com. Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (1998), Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam (1999), Devdas (2002), Dostana (2008), Student of the Year (2012) and Padmaavat (2018)—alongside both Cocktail and Cocktail 2—fall within the long lineage of this tried-and-tested formula. Girl 1 loves boy; boy loves girl 2; girl 2 can’t be with boy because of [insert reason].

The plot of Cocktail 2 has been kept under wraps so far—not much of what is going on can be intuited from the trailer that launched on June 3, except that there is a lot going on. But what nobody saw coming? Rumours of a lesbian subplot between Sanon and Mandanna’s characters that were promptly adopted by hundreds of Bollywood pages on Instagram parroting the same clickbait headlines. It’s not hard to speculate where this rumour could have originated from and why people are so enthusiastically running with it.

It has become deceptively easy to run PR campaigns surrounding upcoming films, using them to stir cultural discourse. Even though Cocktail 2 director Homi Adajania has said there is a good reason behind Sanon’s now-viral ‘threesome’ dialogue from the trailer, what is more interesting is what these conversations reveal about us as a film-going audience. Films like Kabir Singh and Animal, and in the more recent past, Dhurandhar and Tere Ishk Mein, have created the kind of celluloid landscape that mainly swings between masculine hero-worship and trite rom-coms. If two girls in a movie aren’t fighting for the affection of the lone male protagonist and Bollywood is still years away from perfecting genuine female friendships on-screen, the only option is for the audience to brand them as lesbians.

Despite the history of queerness in India spanning centuries, mainstream culture has rarely paid its due to non-heteronormative stories. Since the decriminalisation of Section 377 in 2018, the queer films we have gotten have been few and far between, with Badhaai Do delving into the lavender marriage between a gay cop and a lesbian PE teacher, Ek Ladki Ko Dekha Toh Aisa Laga tracking a Punjabi woman (Sonam Kapoor)’s coming-out story, ‘Geeli Pucchi’ from Ajeeb Daastaan following an intercaste lesbian love story, and Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui centring the romance between a cisgender man and a transwoman (minus points casting Vaani Kapoor in the role) being the last few attempts. Within mainstream culture, the lesbian still exists as a caricature to titillate the male gaze, never as an autonomous individual. Recently, Accused (2026), a film about a successful gynaecologist (Konkona Sen Sharma) facing anonymous allegations of sexual misconduct, explored the fetishistic accusations that lesbians are often slammed with for living their truth and how easily they can be turned into predators when the stigma surrounding their sexuality is weaponised against them.

A nuanced portrayal like that could have benefitted from a wider theatrical release, but there’s a real chance that it would not have been given the CBFC greenlight for ‘defiling Indian culture’ by showing a married Indian lesbian couple. When Deepa Mehta’s Fire released in 1996, it had passed through the censor board with no cuts. Only once it reached the masses did right-wing political parties call for a ban against the “immoral and pornographic” film, saying it went “against Indian tradition and culture”. Theatres were vandalised, cinema-goers were threatened.

Despite the fact that Fire released 30 years ago, it is still hailed as one of the most progressive portrayals of sapphic love to ever come out of Indian cinema. Not only are queer Indians in a post-377 landscape starved of representation, but the only way they get talked about is as a punchline. Even today, it’s common to hear men brag about how they would ‘allow’ their girlfriends to sleep with other women because the emotional significance of such an act doesn’t occur to them. To the real and reel male gaze, a woman having feelings for another woman is a temporary fixation, a brief period of ‘experimentation’, and acting upon those feelings is neatly compartmentalised as ‘raat gayi, baat gayi.’ Now that women have radically decentred men in their lives, the depth of their relationships with other women is being examined with growing interest.

The friendship between Veronica (Padukone) and Meera (Penty) in the original Cocktail had shown us a glimpse of this. At a time when conversations around moving in with your friends instead of your partner weren’t championed like they are today, it was Veronica telling Meera, “Tumne uss apartment ko ghar bana diya hai… Ye Gautams na aate jaate rahege, but tum important ho mere liye. Tum janti nahi ho, but tum ho,” that foresaw a future we’re now rallying around.

Ultimately, the case should be that we have enough WLW representation on-screen so that we don’t foist our queer yearnings upon a movie that isn’t proudly promoting itself as queer. Would it be cool if Ally and Diya do get with each other in Cocktail 2? Sure. Is it okay for the internet to ship Kriti Sanon and Rashmika Mandanna together only because they are two inarguably good-looking women?

It’s Pride month, so I’ll let you answer that one. The brides exchanged vows at sunset by the Arabian Sea during their wedding in Mumbai 56 best lesbian movies to get your heart racing Dutee Chand on the backlash she faced after coming out: “I was made to feel like I did not deserve to live”