Shahrukh Khan - God? New Film to Release

In Bollywood, the line between movie star and deity has always been thin. Shah Rukh Khan's fans have built the man into something close to a god — so it feels fitting that his most ambitious project yet would cast him, in a sense, as one.

Ra.One, the superhero film Khan had been developing for years, was deep in production through 2010 with a Diwali 2011 release on the calendar. Directed by Anubhav Sinha and produced by Gauri Khan's Red Chillies Entertainment, it co-stars Kareena Kapoor and Arjun Rampal, with Khan himself in a dual role — Shekhar Subramaniam, the game designer, and G.One, the superhero who escapes the virtual world to battle the villainous Ra.One in the real one.

The numbers attached to the project were unprecedented for Indian cinema. Principal photography began in March 2010 across India and the UK with an international crew, and the reported budget of around Rs. 150 crore made it the most expensive Indian film mounted at the time — a deliberate attempt to show that Bollywood could compete with Hollywood franchise filmmaking on production terms.

Khan had spent years positioning the film as India's answer to the superhero spectacle, a genre Bollywood had barely touched. Whether the emotional grammar of the masala film would prove compatible with the structural logic of the superhero genre was the open question hanging over the whole enterprise.

For now, though, the prospect alone was the story: the industry's biggest star, treated like a god by his fans, betting his reputation on playing one.