Vidhu Vinod Chopra
has been part of the movies for nearly 40 years now and has produced and directed films like Parinda, 1942 A Love Story, Mission Kashmir, Munna bhai series, PK, 3 Idiots and the very recent 12th Fail. Reminiscing his career, the filmmaker recently spoke about how no one wanted to release his superhit film
Munna Bhai MBBS
.
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He shared, while speaking at the
Kellogg School of Management
, how one distributor Mohammed Bhai from Tamil Nadu agreed to give him Rs 11 lakh for Munna Bhai and had paid Rs 5 lakh as advance.
But when Mohammed Bhai saw the film, he told them he can’t take it as no one will understand the story. “The decision was made to return his money and this was just three days before the release,” revealed
Rajkumar Hirani
.
Vidhu recalled reaching out to
Shyam Shroff
for help to release the film in Tamil Nadu. He said, “So what to do? I called a friend of mine, Shyam Shroff, who was a distributor and had one show in Satyam, a big theatre in Tamil Nadu, he gave me one single show, 11.45 morning show for Munna Bhai. You know how much money I made from Tamil Nadu? Rs 1.67 crore.”
Munna Bhai MBBS is considered to be a landmark film in the history of Indian cinema, it also had a sequel in the form of Lage Raho Munnabhai. The film initially had Shah Rukh Khan in the lead but he backed out as he had to undergo a
back surgery
, thus paving the way for
Sanjay Dutt
to play the main role. The film which released in 2004 had a lifetime box office collection of more than Rs 23 crore.
