Ajay Devgn’s Raid Director Raj Kumar Gupta: “It Hurt When Ghanchakkar Didn’t Do As Expected”

Raj Kumar Gupta was praised to the skies when his small budget Aamir [Rajeev Khandelwal] was critically acclaimed and also turned out to be a fair Box Office success. It was followed by a much bigger No One Killed Jessica [Rani Mukherjee, Vidya Balan] which not just took a good opening but also sustained well to emerge as a clean Hit.

However, when his much hyped Ghanchakkar [Emraan Hashmi, Vidya Balan] couldn’t really cover the distance, he was disheartened for sure.

Nonetheless, five years after the release of his last film, writer-director Raj Kumar Gupta is now back with Ajay Devgn’s Raid and he is more positive than ever before.

“After Aamir and No One Killed Jessica, I was trying to do something different from what I had done before. I didn’t want to serve the same thing over and over to the audience. After making intense thrillers, I wanted to make a comic thriller next. I believed in Ghanchakkar, I thought it was a good story,” says Gupta.

The film did take a reasonably good opening though and its collection were reasonably fair too. However, since expectations were much higher, it saw the tag of being an underperformer attached to it.