Salaar vs. Dunki: A Tale of Two Endings, Beyond the Big Screen

The long Christmas weekend offered a cinematic escape, and two films left me with lingering thoughts. One, “Salaar”, is a dark, adrenaline-fuelled saga of loyalty and sacrifice from Prashanth Neel, the director of KGF, and it held me with its raw intensity. The other, “Dunki”, is a warm, witty story about belonging and the immigrant experience. Both had star power: Prabhas, the pan-Indian sensation, in one, and Shah Rukh Khan in the other. Both set the fan world alight with debates, rumours and box-office comparisons. Both were cinematic gems.

I normally stay until the very end of a film, mostly in hope of a post-credits surprise. This time, what stayed with me was not the action or the dialogue. It was the way the two films rolled their credits.

One ended with a grand fanfare for the director and the producers, each name on a single card filling the screen. The rest of the crew raced past in a high-speed end crawl, almost unreadable. It felt impersonal and fleeting.

The other film’s credits unfolded slowly and deliberately, like a heartfelt embrace. The above-the-line names, the director, producers, writers and stars, received their due, but the spotlight wasn’t theirs alone. From the camera operator to the costume designer, name after name appeared at a pace you could actually read, each credit an acknowledgment, a silent “thank you”. As I watched, I realised this simple act of visibility said a lot about the values behind the film.

What the credits say

The credit sequence is the one part of a film that shows how many hands made it, and the way it rolls tells a story of its own, about leadership and teams.

The blur of unreadable names suggests that the director and the producers are the real makers, and the below-the-line crew a footnote. The slow credits suggest something else: that the designer who built the sets, the gaffer who lit the scene and the spot boy fetching endless coffees all deserve to be seen. We made this together.

Contracts and guild rules decide some of this, of course: who gets a single card, how large the name appears, and in what order. But how a film presents everyone else, the pace of the crawl and whether a name can actually be read, is the makers’ choice. No agreement defines how a creator says thank you.

Beyond the big screen

This is a lesson that goes beyond cinema. In any team, from a startup to a large company, individual brilliance shines only when the whole team is behind it. The best leaders build a culture where every contribution, big or small, is seen and valued.

So the next time you watch a film, stay for the credits. Leadership isn’t about holding the spotlight. It is about turning it on the people who made the work possible.