People's Choice

Haivaan Isn’t Really an Akshay Kumar Film — And That’s the Problem

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11 hours ago

September 11, 2026

Johal

Haivaan Isn’t Really an Akshay Kumar Film — And That’s the Problem

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Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Marketed around its biggest star, Haivaan quietly hands its story to Saif Ali Khan while remaking a 2016 Malayalam thriller almost frame for frame. The result raises a sharper question than whether the film works — it asks who it was actually made for.

Based on Buzz around the movie We have consolidated what has been reported to studio by those who saw the movie and had words flowing as review of the film .

Somewhere between the poster and the projector, Haivaan changes its mind about what kind of film it wants to be.

The marketing sells an Akshay Kumar vehicle. The screen delivers something closer to a Saif Ali Khan character study, wrapped inside a near scene-for-scene remake of the 2016 Malayalam thriller Opam, directed then and now by Priyadarshan. Audiences walking in expecting Kumar to anchor the film may find him present for what amounts to three or four scenes in the first ninety minutes — a role that functions less like a lead performance and more like an extended cameo, deployed mainly to jolt the film awake whenever its pacing threatens to put viewers to sleep.

That’s not a minor marketing quibble. It’s the central tension the film never resolves.

A Remake Without Reinvention

Haivaan is not loosely inspired by Opam. It is, by most accounts from those who’ve seen both, a direct transplant — same structure, same character dynamics, same central mystery involving two blind men, one who lost his sight and one who chose blindness after witnessing something unbearable, bound together by a child both are fighting over for opposite reasons. Priyadarshan directed the original and directs this one, which makes the lack of adaptation harder to explain away as unfamiliarity with the material. Reportedly even dialogue beats and specific plot furniture carry over largely unchanged.

The practical consequence is that anyone who has already seen Opam — available in a Hindi-dubbed version on YouTube — has little reason to buy a ticket. There is no reinterpretation on offer, no new lens, no updated stakes. Just a different cast wearing the same story, stretched from the original’s roughly two-hour runtime to nearly two hours and forty-four minutes.

That extra length is where the film’s other core problem lives. A slow-burn opening built on suspense and psychological tension is a legitimate genre choice — Priyadarshan clearly wants viewers reading faces and second-guessing motives rather than watching fights. But the patience required to get through an unhurried first half, padded further by songs that add little and comic detours that add less, may test even a sympathetic audience. For a thriller, tension is the currency, and tension dissipates when the film seems unsure how much of its runtime it’s allowed to spend building toward very little.

Where The Film Actually Works

Credit where it’s due: the scenes that do land are the ones between the two blind men, staged with deliberately minimal lighting and a score that leans into dread rather than spectacle. It’s old-fashioned suspense filmmaking, and in isolated stretches it works exactly as intended.

Most of that success rests on Saif Ali Khan, playing the role originated by Mohanlal in the original film. Reactions suggest he’s the film’s most consistently praised element — not necessarily because the writing gives him new dimensions, but because he commits to a physically and emotionally demanding part with restraint rather than showmanship. Whether that’s enough to satisfy 2026 audiences the way it satisfied 2016 audiences is a separate question. A twist that felt fresh a decade ago, before remake fatigue and instant access to the source film, may land as predictable rather than clever this time around.

Akshay Kumar’s presence complicates this rather than strengthening it. His character is positioned, at least on paper, as a menacing, near-mythic threat — the kind of role a title like Haivaan implies belongs to him. Revealing his face early, rather than preserving the mystery the original apparently maintained for a majority of its runtime, undercuts that intent before it has a chance to build. What’s left is a recognisable star delivering a handful of scenes with more voice than action, asked to generate fear through presence alone in a script that gives him almost nothing to actually do.

Expectation Versus Delivery

Here’s where audience psychology matters. A film sold on a marquee name creates a specific contract with its audience — that name will carry meaningful weight in the story. When that contract is broken, the disappointment isn’t really about screen time. It’s about feeling misled by the poster.

That’s a marketing failure as much as a creative one, and it’s worth separating the two. Kumar’s reduced role isn’t inherently a flaw — supporting a genuinely strong thriller from the margins can be a legitimate creative choice. The flaw is packaging that choice as something else entirely, then handing audiences a film whose first half tests their patience before the deception is even apparent.

Studio Perspective

The more interesting failure here isn’t really about any single performance. It’s about a director revisiting his own material a decade later and treating that as sufficient justification on its own — without asking whether a story that worked as a modest, character-driven mystery in 2016 needed anything new to justify existing again in 2026, especially with its original Hindi-dubbed version a free click away.

Remaking your own film isn’t inherently a problem. Plenty of filmmakers have returned to earlier ideas with sharper tools and better instincts. What’s harder to defend is doing so with apparently zero creative reinvestment — same locations, same beats, same reveals — while asking a considerably larger budget and considerably bigger stars to carry material that hasn’t been rethought for the audience receiving it now.

That’s arguably the real story underneath Haivaan’s mixed word of mouth and reportedly muted theatrical turnout. It isn’t that the central mystery is badly conceived — Opam evidently wasn’t a masterpiece to begin with, just a solid, modest thriller. It’s that a film built entirely on faithful repetition offers audiences almost nothing they couldn’t get elsewhere, for free, in less time, minus the confusion of wondering why the biggest name on the poster barely shows up in the film.

Whether that’s a failure of nerve, of marketing, or simply of imagination is hard to say definitively. But it leaves behind a question worth sitting with: when a studio remakes a film scene for scene and calls in major stars to sell it, is the audience being offered a new experience — or just a more expensive way to watch something that already exists?

— Studio CarryOnHarry Editorial Desk

More Stories to follow in Horror Genre it needs to be seen if they live upto expectations of audience. A feature coming soon on Sarayapali Ka Wo Ghar

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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Editor's Choice

Netflix UK Debuts Full ‘Twilight’ Franchise and ‘Dune: Part Two’ in Major Content Drop

Published

6 minutes ago

September 12, 2026

Johal

Netflix UK Debuts Full ‘Twilight’ Franchise and ‘Dune: Part Two’ in Major Content Drop

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Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

This week’s Netflix UK refresh includes all five "Twilight" installments alongside Denis Villeneuve’s "Dune: Part Two," part of a 53-item slate comprising 36 films and 17 television series.

For the first time recently, Netflix UK now hosts the complete "Twilight" saga in one location: "Twilight" (2008), "New Moon" (2009), "Eclipse" (2010) and both parts of "Breaking Dawn" (2011, 2012). The franchise, adapted from Stephenie Meyer’s novels, made stars of Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson, whose career since has spanned studio blockbusters and independent films, including a Time 100 mention in 2010 and a body of work that has grossed billions worldwide. These five installments shaped teen cinema of their generation, and their unified availability now allows UK viewers to experience the entire narrative arc on a single platform.

"Dune: Part Two," meanwhile, brings Villeneuve’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel to the platform less than two years after its 2024 theatrical release. The film continues Paul Atreides’ story as he joins Chani and the Fremen against the forces that destroyed his family, with Timothée Chalamet and Zendaya starring. The film has already reached position 15 on Netflix UK’s movies rankings just days after arriving on the service, with further movement expected as the weekend approached.

The broader slate touches several genres and languages: French comedy "Call My Agent! The Movie" closes out that series’ run, alongside new arrivals including "Fauda" season five, "Physical 100: Italy" and Tyler Perry’s "Why Did I Get Married Again?" The latter title debuted at number eight on the platform’s movie chart in its first week, the announcement noted, with the sports documentary "Untold Mr. T: I Pity The Fool" close behind at number seven. Top of the chart was "The Whisper Man," followed by the documentary "Turning Point: Generation 9/11."

For Studio CarryOnHarry, the more interesting story here isn’t the blockbuster addition but the licensing pattern: pairing a two-year-old theatrical hit with a seventeen-year-old franchise suggests platforms are increasingly using nostalgia libraries to anchor subscriber attention around newer, splashier arrivals.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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People's Choice

Spirit Is Stuck in Rewrites — And Prabhas Is Running Out of Time to Prove He’s Still a Star

Published

21 hours ago

September 11, 2026

Johal

Spirit Is Stuck in Rewrites — And Prabhas Is Running Out of Time to Prove He’s Still a Star

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Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s Spirit has reportedly paused shooting over a weak interval scene, pushing the film toward a direct collision with Salman Khan’s Monster. The delay says less about one troubled production than about the widening gap between South Indian stardom and the Hindi box office.

A film is only as strong as its interval point — or so the old theatre-hall wisdom goes. Right now, that piece of conventional filmmaking logic appears to be holding up an entire production.

Spirit, the Prabhas-led thriller directed by Sandeep Reddy Vanga, has reportedly halted shooting altogether, not because of a set collapse or a star’s schedule clash, but because Vanga is said to be unhappy with how the film’s interval portion was written. According to production details circulating around the film, Prabhas plays a police officer, and the interval is built around the death of a close friend — a moment meant to carry both grief and the character’s simmering aggression. The scene as originally written reportedly didn’t land. Rather than shoot around it, the production has apparently paused entirely while the writing is reworked from scratch.

That is a significant call to make this late into a shoot. Spirit is said to be only 40 percent filmed, with roughly 60 more days of principal photography remaining — which, even in the best case, points to another two months of shooting before post-production and promotion even begin. The film’s current release date is reportedly set for March 5, 2027, which happens to be Eid — the same weekend circling for Salman Khan’s Monster.

A Collision Nobody Asked For

On paper, a Prabhas thriller and a Salman Khan action vehicle releasing the same weekend sounds like counter-programming working as intended: two different fanbases, two different flavors of spectacle. In practice, Eid in Hindi cinema has long belonged to Salman Khan almost by default. It isn’t simply that he has a large fanbase — it’s that even audiences who don’t follow him closely have absorbed the pattern that a Salman Khan film arrives on Eid. That kind of calendar ownership is difficult for any competing release to dislodge, let alone one still finishing its shoot.

Salman Khan reportedly missed his Eid slot last year, which may explain why this year’s positioning looks more protected. Monster is said to be wrapping principal photography by mid-October, leaving five to six months for VFX, post-production and a full promotional run — a comfortable runway by industry standards. Spirit, by contrast, is negotiating with itself over a single emotional beat in its second act.

None of this means Spirit is a bad film in waiting. Vanga’s track record — Arjun Reddy, Kabir Singh, Animal — suggests a director whose films generate exactly the kind of repeat viewership that keeps theatres alive, particularly among male audiences who return multiple times regardless of runtime or controversy. Animal drew plenty of criticism over its politics and its women, and audiences showed up anyway, several times over. That pattern is real and shouldn’t be waved away as a sign audiences are being fooled — the multiple viewings are their own kind of a verdict, whatever critics think about the content.

But a filmmaker’s history of delivering isn’t the same as a production timeline behaving itself. Spirit has apparently spent years in various stages of development and has already gone through public friction — most notably Deepika Padukone’s reported exit over pay and working-hour disagreements, before Tripti Dimri came on board, alongside Vivek Oberoi and Nayanthara-adjacent talk around Aishwarya Desai’s role. Add a budget said to already sit around ₹500 crore, with the possibility of climbing to ₹600–700 crore the longer the shoot drags, and the arithmetic stops looking like ambition and starts looking like risk.

The Censor Question Nobody’s Answered

There’s a further wrinkle worth naming plainly: Vanga’s films tend to arrive pre-loaded with the expectation of an A certificate, built around intense violence and dialogue that pushes past what a U/A cut would allow. That’s a deliberate creative choice, not an accident — and one he’s reportedly made peace with in advance. Whether the Central Board of Film Certification is inclined to be as accommodating this time, given how much scrutiny Animal received, is a separate question. Bhushan Kumar’s involvement as a producer may smooth some of that process, but influence over a release date and influence over a censor certificate are not interchangeable things.

The South-to-Hindi Problem Runs Deeper Than One Film

Spirit’s delay is unfolding alongside a smaller, quieter data point that says something larger about the market it’s stepping into. A separate release connected to Vanga’s production banner — reportedly distributed in very limited Hindi screens — appears to have gone almost entirely unnoticed outside South Indian circuits, where its existing fanbase turned out but broader Hindi audiences simply never registered it happened.

That isn’t an isolated case. Dulquer Salmaan’s I Want Talkies is cited as another recent example of a Hindi-dubbed South release landing with barely a ripple in the market it was dubbed for. The pattern points to something the industry doesn’t like discussing out loud: dubbing a film into Hindi is not the same as marketing it to a Hindi audience. Without press events, trailer launches, or any visible push in Mumbai’s media ecosystem, a dubbed release can come and go without Hindi viewers ever knowing it existed — regardless of how the term "pan-India" gets used in a press note. Dr. Shivarajkumar’s Ghost, by comparison, is a useful counterexample — its team reportedly made a visible effort with a proper trailer launch, giving Hindi audiences at least a reason to know the film existed.

The uncomfortable implication is that "pan-India" has become a marketing label applied well before it’s been earned through actual audience-facing work. A film travelling across languages needs its own campaign in each market — not just a dub and a release date.

Studio Perspective

Strip away the star names and Spirit’s situation is a familiar one: a filmmaker with genuine box-office instincts pursuing a level of narrative precision that collides with a production calendar that was never built to accommodate it. Vanga’s insistence on getting one scene right isn’t necessarily indulgence — directors who’ve delivered repeat-viewing hits have earned some benefit of the doubt about instinct. The more interesting question isn’t whether Vanga is right to rewrite the scene. It’s whether a project this expensive, this delayed, and this creatively uncompromising can survive a release calendar dictated by a rival star’s far more disciplined production timeline.

Prabhas, meanwhile, is in a more precarious spot than the "Rebel Star" branding suggests. A run of delayed, underperforming or shelved projects has quietly eroded the assumption that his name alone guarantees a crowd. That’s not a judgment on his talent — it’s an observation about how thin the margin for error has become. Spirit landing well would help recalibrate that. Spirit landing late, against Salman Khan on the one weekend where Khan’s box-office gravity is close to unbeatable, does the opposite regardless of the film’s quality.

The real story here isn’t a scheduling clash. It’s what happens when directorial perfectionism, ballooning budgets, and a market that still hasn’t solved how to sell South-language stars to Hindi audiences all collide in the same release window.

— Studio CarryOnHarry Editorial Desk