The Madras High Court on Tuesday ordered notices to be sent to actor Vishal and director MS Anandan in connection with the release of their film Chakra on the OTT platform. In a plaint filed by Trident Arts, it was alleged that Vishal owed the production house Rs 8 crore to settle the losses of their previous film Action.
Action, released last year, fared poorly at the box office. In the complaint, Trident Arts alleged that during the making of the film, Vishal entered into an agreement with them to settle the losses if the film did not do well at the box office. The film was made on a budget of Rs 44 crore and Vishal entered into an agreement to bear the deficiency if the film fails to collect a minimum of Rs 20 crore at the box office. However, the film went on to collect only Rs 7.7 crore in Tamil and Rs 4 crore in Telugu. Vishal did not settle the losses, alleged the production house.
Claiming that Vishal is yet to settle the Rs. 8.29 crore deficiency that the production house faced with Action turning out to be a box office dud, Trident Arts has sought the court’s intervention in stalling the release of Vishal - Anandan’s film Chakra on the OTT platform until their dues are paid.
On hearing out this issue, the High Court ordered notices to be sent out to the concerned parties for a reply by Thursday, before passing the interim order.
Chakra, which is the sequel to Irumbu Thirai, is directed by director Ezhil’s erstwhile associate Anandan. It has Regina Cassandra and Shraddha Srinath playing the female leads and is likely to hit the marquee this year. Besides bankrolling the film, Vishal is playing the lead role in it as well.
Action starred Vishal and Tamannaah as the lead pair. The film, directed by Sundar C, was bankrolled by R Ravindran under his banner Trident Arts. The supporting cast of this flick included Aishwarya Lekshmi, Akanksha Puri, Ramki, Yogi Babu, and Kabir Duhan Singh. The technical crew of this film comprised Hiphop Tamizha for music with Dudley cranking the camera and NB Srikanth doing the edits.
Vishal currently has Thupparivaalan 2 in his kitty. Thupparivaalan 2 is the sequel to the crime thriller that was released in 2017. The film's director Mysskin recently opted out of the film following a fallout over budget constraints with actor Vishal, who is also the film’s producer. The actor has now taken over directing the film as well.
It may be noted here that Thupparivaalan had Vishal playing the lead role and the star cast also included Prasanna, Vinay, K Bhagyaraj, Andrea Jeremiah, Anu Emmanuel, Shaji Chen, Vijayakumar, Abhishek Shankar, Simran, John Vijay and Master Nishesh. Arrol Corelli had composed music for this film with Karthik Venkatraman working as the cameraman and N Arun Kumar editing it. The crime thriller was produced by Vishal under his home banner Vishal Film Factory and distributed by Madras Enterprises.
(Content provided by Digital Native)