New Delhi, June 10 -- For a decade, the Yash Raj Films spy universe has run on the shoulders of three men and their box office records. On Wednesday the studio formally handed its next chapter to two women, and gave itself just over three weeks to sell the idea.

she is Alpha.

The teaser plays the franchise's greatest hits in a new key. There is a training arc, opening on a father-daughter dynamic and a gift on an 18th birthday that turns out to be a mission rather than a present, and there is Bhatt doing the close-quarters combat the universe has until now reserved for its leading men. The pitch is unmistakable: this is not a spinoff, it is a succession.

The universe's incumbent stars seem to have read it that way too. Shah Rukh Khan, ...