Ayushmann Khurrana on Diwali Holiday Release for Horror-Comedy ‘Thama' (EXCLUSIVE)
Bollywood star Ayushmann Khurrana's horror-comedy 'Thama' has locked in a Diwali 2025 release, marking the first time the critically acclaimed actor will headline a major festive window release in his decade-plus career.
The Maddock Films production, produced by Dinesh Vijan and directed by Aditya Sarpotdar, represents a significant career escalation for Khurrana, who has built his reputation as one of Hindi-language cinema's most bankable stars through unconventional script choices and socially conscious comedies.
More from Variety
Vicky Kaushal's 'Chhaava' Crosses $90 Million Globally, Second Maddock Title to Hit Milestone After 'Stree 2'
'Walking With Dinosaurs': BBC Unveils First Look at Epic Prehistoric Revival - Global Bulletin
Vicky Kaushal's First Look as Chhatrapati Sambhaji Maharaj in Indian Historical Epic 'Chhaava' Unveiled (EXCLUSIVE)
'Thama' represents an expansion of Maddock's horror-comedy universe. The studio, known for releasing films like 'Stree 2,' 'Munjya,' and 'Teri Baaton Mein Aisa Uljha Jiya' in a blockbuster 2024, unveiled a slate of eight interconnected films set to release over the next four years, earlier this year.
The lineup begins with 'Thama,' followed by 'Shakti Shalini' on Dec. 31. In 2026, audiences can expect 'Bhediya 2' on Aug. 14 and 'Chamunda' on Dec. 4. The following year includes 'Stree 3' on Aug. 13 and 'Mahamunjya' on Dec. 24. The universe will culminate in 2028 with 'Pehla Mahayudh' on Aug. 11 and 'Doossra Mahayudh' on Diwali, Oct. 18.'It feels amazing to have a big Diwali release with 'Thama.' It is the biggest release of my career and I'm really eager to spread joy, happiness and laughter with the entire country with 'Thama,'' Khurrana said. 'The fact that my film could be one of the reasons for people to have a great festive period feels really surreal.'
The Diwali slot has traditionally been reserved for Bollywood's biggest stars and tentpole releases, making Khurrana's booking a testament to his box office evolution from indie darling to commercial heavyweight. 'Thama' is currently the only Bollywood film releasing during the Diwali holiday frame, which falls on Oct. 20 this year.
'For me, Diwali is about togetherness, it is about family and it is about having the best community experience by spending time with your friends,' the 'Vicky Donor' star said. 'I'm a big movie buff and every year, I have a ritual to go to the theatres with my family and watch a film on Diwali. We have so much fun together and it makes me so happy to see scores of people thronging to the theatres to watch these big releases.'
'Thama' brings together an ensemble cast including Rashmika Mandanna, Paresh Rawal, and Nawazuddin Siddiqui. Aditya Sarpotdar directs from a screenplay by Niren Bhatt, Suresh Mathew, and Arun Fulara, with Dinesh Vijan and Amar Kaushik producing.
'I'm giving my everything for 'Thama' and I can see my producers Dinesh Vijan and Amar Kaushik, my director Aditya Sarpotdar and the entire team of 'Thama' put in every drop of their energy to make this film a truly incredible big screen experience that will be memorable for everyone,' Khurrana said.
Maddock Films gained prominence in the horror-comedy space in 2018 with 'Stree,' which popularized the genre in Bollywood. The film's blend of humor, supernatural elements and folklore struck a chord with audiences, paving the way for further exploration of the genre. This new cinematic universe is a natural evolution for the studio, bringing together characters and storylines into an interconnected narrative.
The company's epic historical saga 'Chhaava,' starring Vicky Kaushal, is the biggest Indian box office success of 2025 so far.
Best of Variety
New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week
Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz
Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
an hour ago
- Yahoo
How India's 'biggest art deal' buried MF Husain masterpieces in a bank vault
Nearly two dozen paintings by one of the world's most celebrated modern artists - once part of a record-breaking art deal - are set to hit the auction block for the first time next week. On 12 June, 25 rare MF Husain paintings will go under the hammer at an art gallery in Mumbai city, more than two decades after he painted them. This will be the first public glimpse of the paintings, locked away in bank vaults since 2008 after authorities seized them from a prominent businessman over an alleged loan default. "It's like the paintings have come full circle," says Dadiba Pundole, director of Pundole Art Gallery, where the auction is set to be held. Husain used the gallery as his studio for many of these works, part of an ambitious 100-painting series he never finished. Often called the "Picasso of India," he was one of the country's most celebrated - and controversial - artists. His works have fetched millions, but his bold themes often drew criticism. He died in 2011, aged 95. Titled MF Husain: An Artist's Vision of the XX Century, the 25 paintings at Pundole'a gallery offer a glimpse into his take on a transformative century shaped by leaps in technology, politics, and culture. Pundole has estimated that the auction could fetch up to $29m (£21m). This comes months after another Husain painting, Untitled (Gram Yatra), sold for an unprecedented $13.8m at a Christie's auction in New York, becoming the most expensive Indian artwork to be auctioned. The oil-on-canvas masterpiece had adorned the walls of a Norwegian hospital for almost five decades, forgotten by the art world, until the auction house was alerted about its presence in 2013. The latest paintings to be auctioned seem to follow a similar trajectory. Husain began working on them in the early 2000s, with great excitement and vigour, recalls Pundole. "When he was painting, nothing could disturb him. It didn't matter what was happening around him," he adds. In 2004, Husain sold 25 paintings to a Mumbai businessman as the first instalment of a billion-rupee deal. Kishore Singh, author of MF Husain: The Journey of a Legend, wrote about this agreement in the Indian Express newspaper. "He [Husain] wasn't jealous of fellow artists, but he was competitive," Singh writes, noting that Husain struck the deal soon after Tyeb Mehta's Kali [an Indian goddess] set a new record for India's most expensive painting in 2002, selling for 15 million rupees. Husain struck a billion rupees deal with businessman Guru Swarup Srivastava for this series of paintings. Media dubbed it "India's biggest art deal," catapulting the little-known Srivastava into overnight fame as a celebrity collector. But two years later, India's top crime agency, Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), began investigating Srivastava's business, alleging he and associates had misused a loan from a government-backed agricultural body. The CBI alleged Srivastava diverted the funds into real estate, mutual funds, and Husain paintings. He and his company deny all charges; the case remains in court. In 2008, a tribunal allowed the government-backed agricultural body to seize one billion rupees in assets from Srivastava, including the 25 Husain paintings. In February this year, a court cleared the way for the paintings to be auctioned to recover part of the loan. And so, after years locked away in bank vaults, the 25 paintings are finally stepping into the spotlight. In a 2018 interview to author and journalist Tara Kaushal, Srivastava spoke about his stalled deal with the artist. "I had planned to pay Husain for the rest of the paintings by selling the first 25. But legal complications meant that, when Husain called me in 2008 saying the paintings were ready in London and Paris, and to pick them up at the agreed price, my funds were not ready. He understood," he said. Asked why Husain had chosen to sell his paintings to a person who almost nobody knew in India's elite art circles, Pundole says, "He didn't care. As long as his paintings were sold." There's no way to know how Husain felt about the failed deal or his unfinished 20th Century series - but the episode remains a striking footnote in his bold, eventful career. The 25 paintings in this series, vibrant acrylics on canvas, showcase Husain's bold style while reflecting key 20th-century events and social attitudes. One painting shows an unlikely group chatting on a bench, symbolising Husain's call for peaceful dialogue and coexistence among global powers. Another painting honours Charlie Chaplin while juxtaposing a rocket launch to highlight the contrast between social and economic disparities and massive state spending. Other paintings depict a world battling poverty, soldiers in trenches, and humanity confronting tragedies like World War Two, the Partition, and the Holocaust.
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
'I Don't Understand You': Nick Kroll, Andrew Rannells movie inspired by adoption fraud story from filmmakers
While Nick Kroll and Andrew Rannells voice some pretty hysterical characters in Big Mouth, they're now sharing the screen in the horror-comedy I Don't Understand You (now in theatres). Written and directed by married filmmakers David Joseph Craig and Brian Crano, the movie had a particularly interesting starting point. In I Don't Understand You Kroll and Rannells play a couple, Dom and Cole, who have just fallen victim to adoption fraud, but things are looking up. A pregnant woman named Candace (Amanda Seyfried) thinks they're the right fit for the family to adopt her child. But just before that happens, Dom and Cole take a romantic Italian vacation. Things take a turn when they get lost outside of Rome, trying to find a restaurant. As their stranded in an unknown location, the trip turns to bloody Italian chaos. As Craig and Crano identified, the first portion of the movie, up until the couple gets stuck going to the restaurant, is quite close to the real experience the filmmakers had. "We were adopting a child. We had been through an adoption scam, which was heartbreaking, and then had a completely different experience when we matched with the birth mother of our son," Crano told Yahoo. "But we found out that we were going to have him literally like two days before we were going on our 10th anniversary trip." "And we were like, 'Shit, should we not go?' But we decided to do it, and you're so emotionally opened up and vulnerable in that moment that it felt like a very similar experience to being in a horror movie, even though it's a joyful kind of situation." A key element of I Don't Understand You is that feeling of shock once the story turns from a romance-comedy to something much bloodier. It feels abrupt, but it's that jolt of the contrast that also makes that moment feel particularly impactful to watch. "Our sense of filmmaking is so ... based on surprise," Craig said. "As a cinephile, my main decade to go to are outlandish '90s movies, because they just take you to a different space, and as long as you have a reality to the characters that are already at hand, you can kind of take them wherever." "Personally, the situation of adoption was a constant jolt [from] one emotion to another that we felt like that was the right way to tell a story like this, which was literally, fall in love with a couple and then send them into a complete nightmare. And I think you can only get that if you do it abruptly, and kind of manically." While Rannells and Kroll have that funny and sweet chemistry the story needs, these were roles that weren't written for them. But it works because Crano and Craig know how to write in each other's voices so well, that's where a lot of the dialogue is pulled from. Additionally, the filmmakers had the "creative trust" in each other to pitch any idea, as random as it may have seemed, to see if it could work for the film. "When you're with somebody you've lived with for 15 years, there is very little that I can do that would embarrass me in front of David," Crano said. "So that level of creative freedom is very generative." "We were able to screw up in front of each other a lot without it affecting the rest of our day," Craig added. Of course, with the language barrier between the filmmakers and the Italian cast, it was a real collaboration to help make the script feel authentic for those characters. "All of the Italian actors and crew were very helpful in terms of being like, 'Well I feel like my character is from the south and wouldn't say it in this way.' And helped us build the language," Crano said. "And it was just a very trusting process, because neither of us are fluent enough to have that kind of dialectical specificity that you would in English." "It was super cool to just be watching an actor perform a scene that you've written in English that has been translated a couple of times, but you still completely understand it, just by the generosity of their performance." For Craig, he has an extensive resume of acting roles, including projects like Boy Erased and episodes of Dropout. Among the esteemed alumni of the Upright Citizens Brigade, he had a writing "itch" for a long time, and was "in awe" of Crano's work as a director. "Truthfully, in a weird way, it felt like such a far off, distant job, because everything felt really difficult, and I think with this project it just made me understand that it was just something I truly love and truly wanted to do," Craig said. "I love the idea of creative control and being in a really collaborative situation. Acting allows you to do that momentarily, but I think like every other job that you can do on a film is much longer lasting, and I think that's something I was truly seeking." For Crano, he also grew up as a theatre kid, moving on to writing plays in college. "The first time I got laughs for jokes I was like, 'Oh, this is it. Let's figure out how to do this,'" he said. "I was playwriting in London, my mom got sick in the States, so I came back, and I started writing a movie, because I was living in [Los Angeles] and I thought, well there are no playwrights in L.A., I better write a movie.'" That's when Crano found a mentor in Peter Friedlander, who's currently the head of scripted series, U.S. and Canada, at Netflix. "I had written this feature and ... we met with a bunch of directors, great directors, directors I truly admire, and they would be like, 'It should be like this.' And I'd be like, 'Yeah, that's fine, but maybe it's more like this.' And after about five of those Peter was like, 'You're going to direct it. We'll make some shorts. We'll see if you can do it.' He just sort of saw it," Crano recalled. "It's nice to be seen in any capacity for your ability, but [I started to realize] this is not so different from writing, it's just sort of writing and physical space and storytelling, and I love to do it. ... It is a very difficult job, because it requires so much money to test the theory, to even see if you can." But being able to work together on I Don't Understand You, the couple were able to learn things about and from each other through the filmmaking process. "David is lovely to everyone," Crano said. "He is much nicer than I am at a sort of base level, and makes everyone feel that they can perform at the best of their ability. And that's a really good lesson." "Brian literally doesn't take anything personally," Craig added. "Almost to a fault." "And it's very helpful in an environment where you're getting a lot of no's, to have a partner who's literally like, 'Oh, it's just no for now. Great, let's move on. Let's find somebody who's going to say yes, maybe we'll come back to that no later.' I'm the pessimist who's sitting in the corner going, 'Somebody just rejected me, I don't know what to do.' ... It just makes you move, and that's very helpful for me."
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Forbes
Horror Comedy ‘Clown In A Cornfield' Arrives On Streaming This Week
Frendo the Clown in a scene from "Clown in a Cornfield." Clown in a Cornfield — a horror comedy from the director of Tucker & Dale vs. Evil — is coming to digital streaming this week. Directed by Eli Craig, Clown in a Cornfield opened in theaters on May 9. The summary for the movie reads, 'In Clown in a Cornfield, Quinn (Katie Douglas) and her father (Aaron Abrams) have just moved to the quiet town of Kettle Springs, hoping for a fresh start. Instead, she discovers a fractured community that has fallen on hard times after the treasured Baypen Corn Syrup Factory burned down. 'As the locals bicker amongst themselves and tensions boil over, a sinister, grinning figure emerges from the cornfields to cleanse the town of its burdens, one bloody victim at a time. Welcome to Kettle Springs. The real fun starts when Frendo the Clown comes out to play.' Clown in a Cornfield is based on Adam Cesare's book of the same name. The movie also stars Kevin Durand, Carson MacCormack, Cassandra Potenza, Verity Marks, Ayo Solanke, Vincent Muller and Will Sasso. As confirmed by a listing on Prime Video, Clown in a Cornfield arrived on digital streaming via premium video on demand on Tuesday, June 11. In addition to Prime Video, Clown in a Cornfield will be available for purchase for PVOD for $24.99 on such digital platforms as Apple TV, Fandango at Home and YouTube. Since PVOD rentals are typically $5 less than purchase prices, viewers can expect to rent Clown in a Cornfield for 48 hours for $19.99. Naturally, with the word 'clown' in the title of Clown in a Cornfield, Eli Craig knew that it would make fans think of the murderous Art the Clown from director Damien Leone's Terrifier horror hits. As such, Craig made a conscious decision to avoid the unrated horror and gore route of Leone's movies by trusting his own instincts by creating a line that he — and Frendo the Clown — should not cross. 'My gut is the line and sometimes I go to the point where I feel like I'm testing my own gut, where I can't really watch something myself,' Craig said in a Zoom conversation prior to the release of Clown in a Cornfield. "With Terrifier 3, I had to watch the film in little segments to study it and I realized, 'Oh wow, Damien Leone is a master.' I wanted to look at how he was doing in-camera special effects. [At the same time] I had to disassociate what I was seeing to process it. I had to think about the process of how he did stuff so I wouldn't puke.' However, Craig, added, he made sure to take full advantage of what an R rating allowed. 'I feel like I've hit the mark where most people are going to go, 'Ooh!' and start turning away, but then I'm done,' Craig explained. 'I have these moments that may be a little shocking, but there's just a touch of humor in it as well that makes it tolerable. 'I want to have the kills be quite real and a little bit shocking, gritty and brutal, but also have a touch of playfulness to them,' Craig added. 'They're not brutal to the point of being sickening, though. That's the line for me. I'm not interested in making a sickening movie. I want to make a fun movie that has kills in it.' Clown in a Cornfield has earned $7.2 million in domestic ticket sales and more than $532,000 internationally for a worldwide box office gross of $7.7 million to date. Craig said the production budget for the film was 'significantly less' than $10 million. The film also earned a 74% 'fresh' rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics based on 136 reviews, while audiences gave it a 59% 'rotten' score on RT's Popcornmeter based on 500-plus verified user ratings. Clown in a Cornfield arrives on PVOD on Tuesday.
