Amitabh Bachchan walks the ramp with daughter Shweta and son Abhishek

Mukesh Bhatt?s Zeher is a hit in the metros, but the film?s content might have very little to do with its success in the city. The 64-second teaser of Sarkar is finding the audiences rooted to their seats even before the credits for the two-hour Mohit Suri movie have rolled on the screen. He may laugh and cry in Waqt and run after Bunty Aur Babli, but if it?s post-Black Bachchan, it has to be Sarkar.

The coming together of Ram Gopal Varma and Amitabh Bachchan with Abhishek waiting to explode in the wings is what celluloid dreams are made of. Add to that an open Godfather tribute and a sniff of a Bal Thackeray biopic and you know your date?s blocked on July 1. What makes Sarkar even more fascinating is the bizarre casting ? Supriya Pathak plays Bachchan senior?s wife, Katrina Kaif is Bachchan junior?s foreign heartthrob and Rukhsar returns to the big screen after 13 years.

And if the killer trailer is anything to go by, Varma won?t disappoint this time. The promo kicks off with a Mahatma Gandhi quote: ?Think Rightly. Act Rightly. Live Rightly.? And if that?s the thesis, the antithesis comes in Bachchan?s booming baritone: ?Mujhe jo theek lagta hai, main wohi karta hoon.? That?s Subhash Nagare, ?Sarkar? for the world around him, who is ready to go against the entire system to have his way.

Kept mostly in crisp black-and-white images, the teaser bursts into muted colours as the camera reveals a bespectacled Bachchan sipping tea from the saucer, clad in a black silk kurta and a south Indian lungi known as the mundoo, and sporting a heavily-beaded rudraksha necklace with a broad red tilak on the forehead. The promo ends with Sarkar?s own motto: ?There are no rights and wrongs, only power.?

Having done a Marlon Brando already in Agneepath and slated to do Raj Kumar Santoshi?s Family in the same mould, Bachchan may not exactly be playing a Vito Corleone again. Interestingly, Subhash Nagare is no mafia don but a politician in the film and the rhyming of the name with Thackeray is just the starting point of the debate on whether Varma is documenting the life of the Shiv Sena honcho having unleashed the Dawood Ibrahim-Chhota Shakeel tiff in Company.

Shot by Amit Roy ? the man behind the sleek images of Ken Ghosh?s Fida ? Sarkar has been canned in a start-to-finish 40-day shooting schedule. While Abhishek is Shankar, the equivalent of Al Pacino?s Michael Corleone, Kay Kay Menon plays the elder son Vishnu, with Rukhsar as his wife. A co-production of RGV Film Company and K Sera Sera Productions, Sarkar might just herald the return of the maverick whose Satya screen sensibilities had given filmbuffs candid cinematic Company.