Madras HC issues notice to actor Vishal, director MS Anandan over stay on release of Chakra

The Madras High Court has issued a notice to South actor Vishal Krishna and director MS Anandan to seek responses on a plea filed against them by production company Trident Arts.

The production house appealed to the court to restrain the release of Vishal’s upcoming Tamil movie Chakra via an Over the Top (OTT) platform. Trident Arts has filed a plea alleging that Vishal is liable to pay them over Rs 8 crore due to poor box-office performance of his last movie Action.

A bench led by Justice N Sathish Kumar has asked the actor and director to respond by Thursday, reports The Hindu .

The appellant, as represented by lawyer Vijayan Subramanian, said in front of the judges that Action was the fourth film to be bankrolled by the company. It was Vishal, the firm alleged, who had persuaded Trident to produce the movie at a cost of Rs 44 crore.

Vishal also reportedly agreed to be responsible for the losses. If the movie failed to collect a minimum of Rs 20 crore in the states of Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Vishal had said he would be making up for the shortage.

However, directed by Sundar C, the film only managed to garner Rs 7.7 crore in Tamil Nadu and Rs 4 crore in both the Telugu-speaking states. Now with a shortage of Rs 8.29 crore at hand, Vishal agreed to do another film under the banner with Anandan at helm to make up for the loss.

While the sides had finalised a script, the production had to be stopped later due to the pandemic situation, the production firm claimed. Now the appellant was shocked to find that Vishal and Anandan were gearing up to release their next film Chakra via an online streaming platform.

Trident claims that Chakra had the same script that it had finalised as its fifth project. Now it has urged the court to stay the release of the film until the disputes are over and Vishal can provide necessary sureties to make up for Rs 8.29 crore.

The film focuses on cybercrimes and online scams and it also features ShraddhaSrinath and Regina Cassandra in key roles. Vishal had released the trailer of the film sometime back.

Watch the trailer here