'Who killed The Lady Killer?' That's the question doing the rounds in Bollywood over the last week or so. Reference to the context: The Lady Killer, a neo-noir thriller that brought Arjun Kapoor and Bhumi Pednekar together for the first time, has become the first Indian film to release "on paper" with the makers opting to screen it in only a handful of theatres in the country.
Reason? The Ajay Bahl-directed film, a large portion of which was shot in London, remains half done , with the makers resorting to smart editing and voice overs to "complete" the film and release it in theatres as a token of gesture, effectually killing their own film. This has been done as a commitment to the streaming platform to which the film had been initially sold, which, if sources are to be believed, has also decided not to stream the film. The Lady Killer will bow out of theatres in a few days — on November 3, the Friday on which it "released," the film earned only Rs 35,000 — thus ensuring that it will never be found.
So what really happened? While both the cast and crew has remained tight-lipped on the film — Arjun and Bhumi have distanced themselves from The Lady Killer and haven't uttered a single word on it in recent times — sources reveal that the film was effectively dead much before the decision to release it took place. Sources allocated to the budget of the film were reportedly siphoned off, something which was found out during the shoot, leaving Bahl and his team high and dry and unable to complete the project. Another version of the story is that the film went over budget and couldn't be completed.
Arjun Kapoor and Bhumi Pednekar in The Lady Killer
Given that The Lady Killer was being presented by a top production company, the streaming platform in question took it as a package deal with its other big films, with none of the parties really facing a loss.
In fact, neither Bahl, Arjun or Bhumi have been paid for their work in the film. By the time the director — who has credible and critically acclaimed work like BA Pass and Section 375 to his credit, with the latter becoming a sleeper hit of sorts when it released in theatres a few years ago — arranged for funds from somewhere else to complete the shoot, the actors were unavailable because of their other shoot commitments.
The Lady Killer, which also stars Priyanka Bose, S.M. Zaheer, Yashpal Sharma and Deepak Tokas among a larger ensemble cast, reportedly only found a release in 12 theatres across the country. Less than 300 tickets were sold on Friday, with only a few theatres in Mumbai, Delhi, Pune and a few other cities playing the film. Miraj Cinemas in New Town is the only theatre playing the film in Calcutta, at a single show at 9.45pm. On Saturday afternoon, when t2ONLINE checked ticket booking platform Book My Show for the status of the film's sales for the night show, not a single ticket of the film had been sold.
That is expected given that The Lady Killer has been released without most people even knowing that it exists. The trailer of the film was released on the Monday of the same release week. A few reviews of the film talk about the interesting and engaging idea that forms the core of this dark thriller, but do point out the fact that it looks disjointed because of the last-minute hatchet job.
The fate of The Lady Killer may be an aberration but it does illustrate the increasingly self-destructive and ruthless nature of the movie business. In the past, Bollywood has seen many a high-profile incomplete film — Gulzar's Libas to Mukul Anand's Dus to Shekhar Kapur's Time Machine — but none of them have had to meet the kind of fate that The Lady Killer has.