Our kids deserve better than Housefull 5, a broken censor board, and biased audience

Indian Express

16-06-2025

In an age where cinema holds immense power to influence culture and shape young minds, the double standards of the Indian censor board are not just baffling — they are dangerous. Take Housefull 5, the latest instalment of a franchise that has long thrived on adult comedy, double entendre, objectification of women and slapstick vulgarity has been given a U/A certificate, green-lighting it for 'family viewing' with parental guidance. In sharp contrast, Oh My God 2, a film designed to educate teenagers on sex education and adolescent health was slapped with an 'A' certificate, making it inaccessible to the very audience it aimed to enlighten. This contradiction not just exposes the gaping hole in how the censor board defines appropriate content, and what it truly believes is 'safe' for children but also highlights a deeper societal discomfort with truth-telling. Especially, when it comes to sex education.
I witnessed this contradiction firsthand at the screening of Housefull 5 at a multiplex packed with over a hundred people. The audience was a full house of families–from toddlers to seniors, all drawn in by the promise of a 'family entertainer' as implied by the U/A certificate. The Mukesh tobacco ad played, the lights dimmed, anticipation was high. But the moment the film began, a sense of unease settled in.
Billionaire Ranjeet Dobriyal (played by Ranjeet) dies just before his 100th birthday bash on a cruise ship. Soon, characters played by Shreyas Talpade, Dino Morea, Fardeen Khan, Chitrangada Singh, and others are introduced. The discomfort starts early: a female lawyer (played by Soundarya Sharma), enters in a highly sexualised manner with Ranjeet's will, sits provocatively, and becomes the target of a crass joke where the character of Shreyas Talpade uses rolled-up paper as binoculars as she crosses her legs. Some chuckled, others looked on, squirming in their seats.
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But this was just the beginning. In one scene, Soundarya's cleavage is emphasised through two clumsy paper-dropping incidents, drawing the gaze of camera and male characters. One might expect grown adults to roll their eyes at such dated attempts at humour. But when a child, barely 10, sitting near me laughed at the scene, the real problem is obvious — what were they laughing at and what were they learning?
As the film progressed, the scenes grew more disturbing. Akshay Kumar, Abhishek Bachchan, and Riteish Deshmukh each show up with Nargis Fakhri, Jacqueline Fernandez, and Sonam Bajwa, respectively, to stake their claim to Ranjeet's empire–the only clue being that Jolly, his heir, has a foreigner wife and a burn mark on his butt. What follows is a slew of jokes centred around skin show, sexual positions, and degrading female characters. Especially when Akshay Kumar asks Nargis Fakhri to show off her body to prove she is a 'foreigner' woman. Phrases like '69' and visual gags of women being inappropriately touched in the dark pass off as punchlines. The curiosity these scenes brought in children's eyes wasn't comic–it was loaded with questions no parent had prepared to answer. And who could blame them? The CBFC told them this was 'safe' to watch — that this was 'family-friendly entertainment.'
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But so was not the fate of Oh My God 2, a film that dared to do what our education system often avoids. With Akshay Kumar in a divine avatar, the 2023 film approached topics like masturbation and puberty not with vulgarity, but with empathy and clarity. It was not flawless but a sincere effort to destigmatise topics that are often hushed in Indian homes and classrooms.
But the CBFC found it to be 'too explicit', delayed it, ordered multiple cuts, and finally stamped with an 'A' certificate.
Rather than focusing on the content and its purpose, censor board was busy taking issue with Akshay Kumar originally playing Lord Shiva in OMG2, forcing the makers to recast him as 'Shiv ka Das' to avoid offending religious sentiments. However, it didn't find an issue with the way women were objectified, crass dialogues and voyeurism in Housefull 5–and labelled it U/A.
The most sobering reality is not just the system–it's us, the audience. Housefull 5, despite its regressive humour and objectification of women, is racing ahead at the box office. Tickets are selling out, laughter echoes in packed theatres, and it is being labelled as 'mass entertainer'.
We are the same people who laugh at sexist jokes in movies like Housefull 5 or watch it with our children in theatres but often be the first one to raise moral alarms when a web series depicts nudity, intimacy, or profanity–even when done in context. The double standards of the censor board only reflect the double standard of our society.
Jyothi Jha works as a Copy Editor at the Indian Express. She brings in more than 5 years of experience where she has covered Entertainment majorly for TV9, NDTV and Republic Media. Apart from Entertainment, she has been an anchor, copy editor and managed production team under the Politics and Daily News segment. She's passionate about Journalism and it has always been her first choice, she believes in what George Orwell had once said, " Journalism is printing what someone else does not want you to do, rest everything is public relations". ... Read More