Sudhanshu Saria alleges Ekta Kapoor's ALTBalaji of plagiarising his film's poster for new show His Story

National Award-winning filmmaker Sudhanshu Saria has alleged that producer Ekta Kapoor’s streaming platform ALTBalaji has plagiarised the poster of his film Loev for its new show His Story. The show, backed by Ding Entertainment, is scheduled to start streaming on ALTBalaji and ZEE5 Premium from 25 April. It stars Satyadeep Mishra, Priyamani Raj and Mrinal Dutt. Saria, who bagged the National Award for best direction last month for his feature Knock Knock Knock, took to Twitter on Friday and shared the poster of his acclaimed 2015 same-sex romantic drama, which featured the film’s two leads lying in an embrace. The film starred Dhruv Ganesh and Shiv Panditt. The poster of His Story, shared by ALTBalaji on its social media pages, also showed their characters in a strikingly similar position. In a Twitter thread, Saria wrote he was disappointed at the makers for “blatantly” copying his poster. “Why is this industry like this? Woke up to find that our painstakingly illustrated, original poster for @loevfilm has just been blatantly ripped off by the geniuses at @altbalaji @ZEE5Premium for their show #HisStoryy. “Thirteen months of back and forth and so many drafts by the amazing minds at @TalkPigeonCo with oversight by @jahanbakshi and amazingly illustrated by artist @rohanpore just ripped off without any decency,” the director said. Tagging the show’s cast along with Kapoor, Saria wrote, “if you didn’t know, now you do.” The director also apologised on the microblogging site for failing to protect the work of his collaborators as he was one of the producers of Loev. Saria wrote the culture of copying an artwork “must end.” “I am glad they liked our poster; am glad they’re telling a queer story but why do this? What is the need? We made our poster with no funds to speak of. Why have massive machinery like @altbalaji @ZEE5India if you can’t even come up with your own poster?” Hours after Saria’s allegations, ALTBalaji spokesperson said the team would never plagiarise any artist’s work and is currently looking into the matter. “We at ALTBalaji hold every artist’s representation of work as paramount and will never intentionally pick up another artist’s hard work. We have got multiple creative partners working on our show posters and are doing our due diligence on this,” the statement read.