Dhamaal 4, starring Ajay Devgn and Riteish Deshmukh, reportedly includes a post-credit scene teasing Dhamaal 5, according to The Times of India. The move mirrors Hollywood's MCU playbook — but in Bollywood's case, pre-announcing a sequel before the current film proves itself at the box office reveals an industry increasingly reliant on franchise IP to mask a deepening original-script drought.

Here is a question no Bollywood producer wants asked out loud: if you are so confident in the film you have made, why are you already selling the next one before this one has earned a single rupee?

Dhamaal 4, the latest instalment of the slapstick franchise starring Ajay Devgn and Riteish Deshmukh, reportedly includes a post-credit scene that teases Dhamaal 5, as reported by The Times of India. The scene is said to arrive after the climax — a wink-nudge moment designed to send audiences out of the theatre buzzing about the next ride before they have even decided whether this ride was worth the ticket.

On the surface, it is a familiar move. Marvel Studios turned the post-credit tease into a global religion: stay through the scroll of names, get a dopamine hit about what comes next. But Marvel earned that trick on the back of billion-dollar box-office runs, interconnected storytelling, and a decade of audience trust. Bollywood's adoption of the same playbook — particularly for a comedy franchise whose last instalment, Total Dhamaal (2019), drew mixed reviews even as it crossed ₹150 crore, according to industry trackers — raises a fundamentally different question.

Inside Talk

The chatter in trade circles, according to industry sources, is blunt: this is not about storytelling ambition. It is about OTT leverage. In today's Bollywood economics, a franchise with a publicly announced sequel pipeline is worth significantly more in streaming negotiations than a standalone film. The logic is transactional — if a platform buys Dhamaal 4, the tease for Dhamaal 5 essentially forces them into a first-look or pre-buy conversation for the next one. The IP, not the individual film, becomes the product being sold.

Whispers in production corridors suggest that several mid-budget Hindi franchises are now engineering post-credit teases not because the creative team has a story burning to be told, but because the business affairs team needs negotiating ammunition. "The sequel announcement IS the business plan," is how one trade analyst, speaking to reporters covering Bollywood's franchise push, framed it. (This reflects industry chatter and unverified speculation, not confirmed fact.)

There is also a fan-base calculus at play. Ajay Devgn, who has anchored the Dhamaal series alongside Riteish Deshmukh since the original 2007 film, brings a loyal mass-market audience — but loyalty to a star is not the same as loyalty to an IP. Marvel's post-credit scenes worked because audiences were invested in characters across films; Bollywood's slapstick comedies, by contrast, rarely carry narrative threads from one instalment to the next. The Dhamaal franchise is essentially the same gag engine with new set-pieces. Teasing a fifth instalment before the fourth has faced the audience is less a creative promise and more a corporate flex.

The Script Crisis Hiding Behind the Sequel

India Herald's read of what is really driving this goes deeper than one franchise's marketing stunt. Bollywood is in the grip of a structural original-script famine. Consider the broader landscape: Rohit Shetty's cop universe, the Golmaal franchise, Hera Pheri's endlessly delayed third chapter, and now Dhamaal's pre-emptive sequel announcement — the Hindi film industry's most bankable commercial propositions are almost all legacy IPs being stretched, not new ideas being born.

The economics are revealing. An original comedy script by a new writer faces an almost impossible gauntlet: star attachment is uncertain, marketing budgets are prohibitive, and OTT platforms — now the true paymasters — demonstrably prefer franchise titles with built-in search volume over untested originals. According to trade reports, franchise comedies command OTT premiums of 30-40% over standalone titles of similar budgets, purely because the brand name reduces the platform's subscriber-acquisition cost. That single number explains why Dhamaal 5 is being teased before Dhamaal 4 has earned its keep.

The irony is thick enough to choke on. Bollywood's comedy tradition — from Hrishikesh Mukherjee's originals to the early 2000s wave of Priyadarshan and Indra Kumar hits — was built on the surprise of new characters, new setups, new worlds. The Dhamaal franchise itself was once a fresh idea: four bumbling treasure hunters, a zoo's worth of animal gags, and Sanjay Dutt glowering through the chaos. Nearly two decades later, the freshness is gone, but the brand name remains — and in 2026 Bollywood, the brand name is all that matters.

Where This Goes Next

The forward projection is uncomfortable but clear. If Dhamaal 4 performs even modestly — and given Ajay Devgn's consistent box-office floor, as tracked by Bollywood Hungama and trade analysts, it likely will — the post-credit tease will be retroactively validated as genius marketing. Expect other mid-tier franchises to adopt the same playbook within the year: announce the sequel before the current film's opening weekend, lock OTT pre-buys on the strength of the announcement, and treat each theatrical release not as a standalone creative bet but as a trailer for the next deal.

The casualty, quietly, is the original screenplay. Every rupee a platform commits to a franchise pre-buy is a rupee not available for the untested script by the unknown writer. Every theatre screen held for the fourth instalment of a familiar brand is a screen denied to the debut that might have been this generation's Andaz Apna Apna — itself, let us remember, an original that became a classic precisely because no one pre-sold a sequel before it had earned its audience.

Ajay Devgn and Riteish Deshmukh will almost certainly deliver the reliable laughs their audience expects. The real question is not whether Dhamaal 4 works — it is whether Bollywood has quietly decided that the only ideas worth backing are the ones that have already been had.

And if the answer is yes, then that post-credit scene is not a tease for Dhamaal 5. It is a eulogy for every original script that will never get greenlit because the franchise pipeline was already full.

Reported and written with AI assistance under India Herald's editorial standards; a human editor governs publication.

Key Takeaways

• Dhamaal 4's post-credit Dhamaal 5 tease mirrors MCU strategy but arrives before the current film has proven box-office worth — a franchise-first, audience-second move.
• Trade circles suggest franchise comedies command 30-40% OTT premiums over standalone titles, making pre-announced sequels a negotiating lever rather than a creative decision.
• Bollywood's most bankable comedy propositions in 2026 are almost entirely legacy IPs — Golmaal, Cop Universe, Hera Pheri, Dhamaal — with original comedy scripts struggling to find greenlight.
• If Dhamaal 4 performs even modestly, expect other mid-tier franchises to adopt post-credit sequel teases within the year to lock OTT pre-buys.
• The deeper casualty is the original screenplay: every franchise pre-buy commitment is a rupee diverted from untested new voices.