At the beginning of this season’s Koffee With Karan, host Karan Johar with his usual candour admitted that he wasn’t sure if the chat show would return. “We, as an industry, were vilified. We were absolutely put into the dungeons for two years. It wasn’t an easy time, a snake emoji would come out every time Koffee with Karan was mentioned. At one point, I even thought that I would never come back with this show because there was a lot of attack,” he said in his conversation with actors Alia Bhatt and Ranveer Singh on the first episode of the show, telecast this July.

Johar was talking about the Twitter trend #BoycottBollywood that keeps re-appearing time and again. It originated sometime around the untimely demise of actor Sushant Singh Rajput. Unlike most “trends”, this one hasn’t died, instead it gets a new lease of life just before the release of any big budget movie. At the time of writing this article, it was trending along with #BoycottKaranJohar and #BoycottBrahmastra. With films mounted on budgets that go into hundreds of crores starting to bite the dust at the box office, one would wonder if the boycott call was powerful enough to be the cause. Is it? “No,” the film fraternity echoes unanimously.