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Indian Express

When Vijay Mallya produced a Bollywood film that lost Rs 4 crore with Suniel Shetty, Bispasha Basu; exited movie business swiftly afterwards

Way before Vijay Mallya was a fugitive and living in the UK, trying to not get extradited, there was a time when he was enjoying the high life. In the early 2000s, Vijay was seen throwing the most lavish parties that often ended up in the tabloids and the industrialist was known to be rubbing shoulders with the most popular actors of the time. He was the chairman of the alcohol beverage company United Spirits, and as a part of their surrogate advertising, they launched an annual fashion calendar and to promote that, Vijay often threw the most luxurious parties. During this time, Vijay also wanted to get involved in the movie making business. In 2004, Vijay decided to produce a film, along with Suniel Shetty, and they decided to get a huge ensemble cast on board. Suniel was also starring in the film along with Bipasha Basu, Sanjay Dutt, Dino Morea, Amrita Arora, Neha Dhupia. Titled Rakht, the film had Bipasha Basu playing a fortune teller, who is also a psychic, and was directed by Mahesh Manjrekar. This was one of the early 2000s films where men were acting violent for no reason, women demanded saving from their abusive husbands and plots came to an abrupt halt because the film's runtime was over. At the time, Suniel described his character to The Telegraph as a 'mentally deranged mechanic'. The film's budget was around Rs 12 crore, as per Box Office India, and it only managed to recover Rs 8 crore. For Vijay Mallya, this was his only time producing a film. At the time, he announced this as his new big venture but soon, his plans changed. He told Economic Times, 'We are going into movie making in a big way.' Around the same time, the Tatas were also investing in the movies as Ratan Tata's company produced Bipasha, Amitabh Bachchan and John Abraham-starrer Aetbaar. As per Rediff, the Tata group lost Rs 3.5 crore in the movie and decided to pull out of Bollywood. Raymond group's Vijaypat Singhania was also trying to get his company's movie arm off the ground around the same time. They made a film called Woh Tera Naam Tha in 2004, which was directed by Kuku Kohli and starred Arjan Bajwa. Arjan recently recalled his meeting with Vijaypat Singhania before he was signed on for the film. Eventually, all he business conglomerates left the movie business. ALSO READ | Sikandar: Anurag Kashyap's right; Bollywood is doomed if stars like Salman Khan enable the Snapchat-ification of cinema For Bipasha, this was the time when he career revolved around films that were somehow connected to the supernatural genre. She appeared in Aetbaar, Rudraksh and Madhoshi in the same year. Suniel Shetty had recently turned producer with his company Popcorn Motion Pictures Private Limited and had already had a flop with Khel, which starred him, Sunny Deol, Ajay Jadeja and Celina Jaitly. This was another flop film for his production house. After this, he produced films like Mission Istanbul and EMI, but none of them made an impact on the box office. Suniel was last seen in Kesari Veer.