Kamal Haasan Replaced Rajinikanth In Indian Because Of This Reason ( Photo Credit – IMDb )
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Kamal Haasan will soon be back with his sequel, Indian 2, and Rajinikanth is reportedly gearing up for Jailer 2, which is titled Hukum. While the two superstars from the South are in the news, we found an interesting connection between the two for one of their upcoming films.
Recently, the release date of the Indian sequel has been announced, and the film will arrive in theaters in June, 28 years after the first film was released, and generated a lot of buzz.
Indian was released in Tamil and Telugu theaters in 1996, while the Hindi version was released as Hindustani. But what if we tell you that Kamal Haasan was not the OG choice to play Senapathi in the film? In fact, it was none other than Rajinikanth.
Rajinikanth & Shankar’s Pair
Before Indian, S Shankar worked on a film called Gentleman, a heist-film that starred Arjun Sarja & Madhoo. In 1993, it was the highest-grossing Tamil film that year and collected according 8.29 crore gross in Tamil. The film was a super hit and won accolades all over.
Periya Manushan
After Gentleman’s success, Rajinikanth was too impressed with the director and asked Shankar if they could unite on something on similar lines of his much successful film. It was then that a script called Periya Manushan was offered to Anna. However, he was stuffed with projects at that time and eagerly wanted to do the film. But that meant Shankar had to wait for another few months, and he did not want to wait. For once, Shankar even considered making Periya Manushan in Telugu with Rajasekhar as the lead and Venkatesh or Nagarjuna as the second fiddle.
Kamal Haasan Was Signed
In 1995, producer AM Rathnam signed S Shankar to make the film, and he immediately offered Senapathi’s role to Kamal Haasan. The film was then titled Indian, and not only this, Aishwarya Rai was offered the lead role opposite Kamal Haasan. But Aish had a modeling contract, and she could not walk out of it. Hence, Manisha Koirala was finalized.
The Costliest Film
Indian was the costliest film of India that year, and the film was mounted on a budget of reported 15 crore in 1996. It turned out to be the highest-grossing Tamil film of that year, with a reported 20+ crore gross in Tamil Nadu. It was released in Hindi as Hindustani.
After 28 years, Kamal Haasan will be back as Senapathi for the vigilante film. Hopefully, it will break all the records at the box office.
