The CBFC has cleared Drishyam: The Conclusion with a U/A 16+ certificate, a runtime of 150 minutes, and not a single cut.
Not one visual modification. Not one audio change. Per Bollywood Hungama, which reported the certification as an exclusive, the Examining Committee also waived the usual additions: no mandated title cards, no anti-drug ticker, no advertisement inserts.
That is the third significant clean pass in seven days, and at this point it has stopped being a coincidence.
The Certificate
- Certificate: U/A 16+
- Runtime: 150 minutes
- Cuts or modifications: none
- Certified: 28 September 2026
- Release: 2 October 2026
For the franchise, the runtime sits between the other two. The 2015 original ran 162 minutes. Drishyam 2 in 2022 ran 142. The Conclusion is 150, which makes it eight minutes longer than the second film and twelve shorter than the first.
Confirmed by Sacnilk and 123telugu.
Why The Eight Minutes Matter
A Drishyam film is a machine. The whole structure is a setup and a reveal, and the audience arrives knowing that is what they are buying. Runtime in this franchise is not an artistic flourish, it is load-bearing.
Eight minutes longer than Drishyam 2 suggests either a third act that needs more room to land its mechanism, or a film that is tying off a trilogy and owes its audience some closing business.
Either way, 150 minutes is disciplined. It is a producer who understands that the reason this series works is that it does not sprawl.
The Pattern We Have Been Tracking
Count the certification decisions this publication has covered since 24 September.
The Paradise took an A. Nani spent a Mumbai press meet defending it, conceding that the film is violent and arguing the violence has purpose.
The Vvaan took a U/A 16+ with zero cuts, which we described at the time as the first real test of whether the revised age bands do what they were meant to do.
Drishyam: The Conclusion has now taken a U/A 16+ with zero cuts, on a film whose entire subject is a man concealing a death from the police.
Three films. Three different intensities. Three certificates that describe the audience rather than punish the picture. On the two U/A 16+ titles, the board rated rather than cut.
We wrote on 24 September that one film clearing without cuts was a data point, not a trend, and that the trend would be six months of releases where the intensity conversation happens through the certificate rather than a negotiated edit list.
It is not six months. It is one week. But the direction is now consistent enough to say out loud.
The Waived Tickers Are The Underrated Detail
The anti-drug ticker, the statutory title cards, the mandated public service inserts. These are the small impositions that Indian filmmakers have absorbed for years as the cost of doing business, and they are frequently more disruptive to a film than a cut would be, because they sit on top of the image while the audience is watching.
A board that declines to require them on a film that does not need them is a board exercising judgement rather than applying a template. That is a meaningful shift in posture, and almost nobody will report it.
The Timing Problem Sitting Next To This
Certification cleared on 28 September for a 2 October release is four days of margin, which is tight but normal for a Hindi tentpole.
What is not normal is the other thing that happened to this film’s production house on the same day. The Income Tax Department searched twelve locations in Mumbai connected to a group of industry names including Panorama Studios and Kumar Mangat Pathak. We have covered that separately. No charges have been brought and no findings announced.
The two are unconnected as far as anything on the record shows. They are simply both true on 28 September, four days before the film opens.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Good. Again.
We have spent a week being cautious about calling this a new regime, and the caution was correct, but three clean passes in seven days on films of genuinely different intensity is the CBFC behaving the way a certification body is supposed to behave. Rate it, band it, let the audience decide. Stop editing.
The real test is still coming and everybody knows what it is. Not an action film, not a thriller about a man outwitting a police investigation. A film that says something inconvenient about somebody with the standing to object. That is when we will find out whether the scissors are gone or just in a drawer.
Until then: 150 minutes, uncut, on 2 October. Do not read anything about the ending.
Sources
- Bollywood Hungama, exclusive on the certificate, runtime, absence of cuts and waived tickers
- Sacnilk, certification and runtime confirmation
- 123telugu, censor clearance
- Box Office Worldwide, runtime and release date
