Dubai: In a press conference in Dubai, the UAE based business tycoon, B. R. Shetty, has categorically said that he has shelved the Rs. 1000 crore Malayalam movie ‘Randamoozham’ following a rift between the Director and Script Writer. The movie was also criticized for its plot which was based on the Hindu epic Mahabharatham.
Mohanlal was roped in to play the role of the main protagonist, Bheema, through which the story line progresses.
The project hit the headlines when it was first announced in 2016. The huge budget of the movie caught everyone’s attention and was counted as the biggest movie ever to be made in India. The movie was planned to be dubbed into Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and even English to appeal to a wider audience worldwide.
However, during the pre-production works itself, rifts began to appear between the Director V. A. Shrikumar Menon and Script Writer M. T. Vasudevan Nair. Though, Shetty issued an ultimatum to the duo to stop the feud it fell on deaf ears, after which the producer announced his withdrawal from the project.
M. T. Vasudevan Nair, an award winning veteran writer in Malayalam, was apparently upset with the director’s slow pace during the pre-production stage. He soon demanded his script back to which the director opposed. This led to a court fight between the artists and resulted in the script writer winning back his script.
Vasudevan Nair developed the script from his novel of the same name. It follows the story of Mahabharatham from the viewpoint of Bheema.
However, people were upset about the project because Vasudevan’s novel is a twisted version of the epic story of Mahabharatham. The novel depicts the characters of Mahabharatham stripped of divinity which most of us are familiar with.
Vasudevan Nair is a prolific writer in Malayalam, a film maker and script writer.
B. R. Shetty is a UAE based Indian billionaire and founder of NMC Healthcare. He is included in Forbes list of India’s Richest People both in 2015 and 2016.
