Hrithik Roshan’s War against Chiranjeevi’s Sye Raa

Remember how Farhan Akhtar and Ritesh Sidhwani’s Excel Entertainment had insisted on releasing the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Raees alongside Hrithik’s Kaabil? Well, it’s payback time now.

In a sudden and unexpected move, Yash Raj films has decided to dub their big Gandhi Jayanti release War featuring Hrithik Roshan and Tiger Shroff in three South Indian languages —Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam — besides Hindi.

This places the other big Gandhi Jayanti release Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy (originally in Telugu and dubbed into Hindi, Tamil, and Malayalam) at a singular disadvantage, as the multi-language format was the major USP that this Telugu film was hoping to cash in on.

A source close to YRF reveals, “The decision to dub War into South Indian languages is taken in the light of the huge enthusiasm that the film’s trailer has whipped up. Yash Raj never expected this level of pan-India interest in their product. So they decided to make it more accessible in the South.”

Whatever the reason for expanding its bandwidth and reach, War will now give Sye Raa Narasimha Reddy a big fight everywhere in South India, except, of course, in Andhra Pradesh, where Chiranjeevi fans will make sure there is no competition for their iconic star’s most ambitious film.

For the rest of the country, it is open war in multiple languages on the most peaceful day of the year.