Actor Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub said that he got angry after seeing the AI-altered climax of Raanjhanaa and wanted to sue Eros International, the company which made the changes to the film. Zeeshan found it humiliating to see the new version and wanted to sue Eros.
During a conversation with Digital Commentary, Zeeshan said, “In my opinion, it’s a very bad thing. I totally disagree. There’s a whole world, and then there’s a storyteller who weaves it. I think the beauty of Raanjhanaa was that it gave you both pain and satisfaction — that final stage of love where you reach your own death, and it was so beautiful that you let it happen. That beauty shouldn’t be taken away. You changed the essence of the film; you took it away.”
He added, “You took a very important emotion away from the audience. I even got angry, I thought, ‘I’ll sue them, man.’ The only respect we have is that our acting is good, and here they made my shot with AI — and it’s such a humiliating shot that my heart just sank. I’ll never cry the way shown in the AI version.”
In the recently re-released Tamil version of the film, the climax has been entirely changed to make it a happy ending. Dhanush’s Kundan survives in the end and is seen to be taking long breaths lying on the hospital bed. Zeeshan, who plays his best friend Murari, is shown to be peeking through a glass on the ICU door and shedding happy tears seeing his friend alive.
The film’s director Aanand L Rai expressed his strong displeasure over the changed ending and distanced himself from it. “Let me say this as clearly as I can: I do not support or endorse the AI-altered version of Raanjhanaa. It is unauthorised. I had no role in it. Neither did the team that made the film. And whatever it claims to be, it is not the film we intended, or made," he wrote on Instagram recently.
Meanwhile, Eros maintained in a statement that the re-release is a "respectful reinterpretation and not a tampering of the original”.
