Sana Khalid 
Hollywood’s Karachi has long existed more as an imagined backdrop than a real city. Karachi is often shown on screen as a dusty war zone; the setting can be any other place in South Asia or Southeast Asia that is supposedly dangerous. It is a movie shortcut that does not reflect the diversity of the city, contemporary skyline, cultural life, and the economic complexity and turns it into a stereotype that was created to be convenient instead of precise.
It is not only the visual misrepresentation, but the narrative framing. Stories set in Hollywood’s Karachi often revolve around extremism, chaos, or espionage, rarely showing everyday life or nuance. The filmmakers usually depict these scenes in completely different nations, which adds to the creation of an inverted image based on assumptions instead of the reality experienced.
Why Karachi Becomes a Placeholder City in Films
Hollywood’s Karachi is frequently used as a symbolic stand-in for geopolitical tension because global audiences already associate the region with instability. This repetition is a feedback loop, films enforce a biased perception, and bias shapes the next story. What it has gotten itself is a city caught in a film identity that it did not desire.
Karachi will be misinterpreted, not due to its nature, but due to the way it is continually represented on the screen, until cinematic creators invest in research and proper representation.
