Can't say. Have women been given enough films for us to see that whether they can pull audience or not? Women oriented films nearly always have darker or more adult oriented subjects, are more sober in nature. While your highest grossing films outside Aamir Khan cinema are more low effort, larger than life subjects. We just assume women can't pull audience to theatres. We have no idea if they actually can or can not. That's not the audience's fault, it's the industry being inherently biased.
I mean if Arjun Kapoor can get diverse genres like spy drama, historical, Siddharth Malhotra can get multiple big budget spy thrillers, heck Varun Dhawan or Ranbir or Ranveer can go from huge flops to big budget starring vehicles, why not give heroines a chance?
I don't particularly care for Kangana but Manikarnika opened well. Holiday slot, Easy subject, Big Budget, It opened. It sucked so it couldn't sustain. But it opened. Dirty Picture had a fun take on the standard woman Maryada biopic and it opened pretty well. So did Veere Di Wedding.
Once you have Deepika leading large war based period pieces, Kareena doing spy films, Katrina beating the crap out of 100 thugs, Alia becoming a superhero, you would know if they can or can not pull audience.
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