It’s been seven years since SRK got out for a duck with Aanand L. Rai’s Zero. It dwarfed the actor and its director for a few years until SRK clambered back into the reckoning in 2023. Will Aanand — who romanced the box office with small-town stories like Tanu Weds Manu (2011) and Raanjhanaa (2013) but looked like a rejected lover with Zero, Atrangi Re (2021) and Raksha Bandhan (2022) — end his seven-year date with failure?
If one were to go only by a well-cut teaser, the curious cast of Dhanush from Chennai and Mumbai girl Kriti Sanon in a passion-pain-fury love story titled Tere Ishk Mein may just pull off a surprise at the box office this November.
“It will certainly spark off conversations around gender,” promised director Aanand whose third instalment of Tanu Weds Manu is also taking shape in his head. Contrary to the many stories out there, Aanand confirmed that he will make it only with the original lead pair, R. Madhavan and Kangana Ranaut. “No question of replacing them with anybody else,” he said.
The Punjabi filmmaker is so close to Maddy and Dhanush that he relishes the south Indian spread at the former’s house and the latter always stays with him in Mumbai instead of checking into a hotel. Tere Ishk Mein is Aanand’s third film with Dhanush and his third with A.R. Rahman too. In great sync with Rahman, he’s not only comfortable with the long, mandatory nights in Chennai but also used to the maestro’s heart attack-giving habit of tinkering with the music until release hour. There’s a hint of a lovely title tune that lingers in Tere Ishk Mein. But neither producer Bhushan Kumar of T-Series nor Aanand has the final version of the song. That’s how Rahman works.
After his many setbacks, Aanand typifies the Hindi filmmaker of today who knows not where his audience has vanished and therefore introspects. “Maybe,” he concedes aloud, “I was subconsciously in an insecure spot looking for balance and validation by thinking that working with a big star like Akshay Kumar was what I should do.” Also, with Raksha Bandhan, he thought he was catering to the Tier 2 and Tier 3 audience. “I was wrong.”
With Dhanush in the news for his Kriti Sanon-starrer and Rishab Shetty’s Kantara toppling Sunny Sanskari Ki Tulsi Kumari, it was a Southie wave that hit Mumbai last week.
In a pull-aside with Rishab Shetty, the actor-filmmaker was full of smiles and at ease in his off-white veshti and simple matching shirt. Wife Pragathi is the costume designer of Kantara. “Whatever she gives me, I wear,” he beamed. For a filmmaker who has leapfrogged from a ₹16 crore Kantara (2022) to the ₹150 crore prequel Kantara: A Legend Chapter 1, he betrayed no anxiety. “Maybe more (than ₹150 crore),” he revealed. Pragathi too had worked with one assistant the first time around which grew to about two dozen pairs of hands by the time 2025 rolled along. Without many references to go back in time for the prequel, Pragathi looked at our ancient temples for inspiration to design the costumes.
In 2022,the Kannada-flavoured folklore thriller with pulsating music had stunned the trade when the ₹16 crore investment had grossed ₹400 crore worldwide, ₹81 crore coming in only from the fastidious Hindi belt.
In 2025, when the box-office has baffled Mumbaiwallahs, Rishab’s cool was a justified contrast: Kantara has collected more than double the sales of Sunny Sanskari... on opening day in Hindi and is poised to effortlessly get back its investment and some more in the first week itself.
Bigger may just be better because Rishab has endearing energy on screen and has intriguingly left some questions unanswered in the prequel, making room for explanations in the third instalment.
This Dussehra, the fireworks definitely came from Bengaluru.
Bharathi S. Pradhan is a senior journalist and an author