This 200-crore Bollywood film was the biggest disaster of 2022, leading man cried after failure

Akshay Kumar starrer Samrat Prithviraj, based on the life of life of Prithviraj Chauhan, a Rajput king from the Chahamana dynasty released in June 2022 and turned out to be a colossal disappointment at the box office. The film was bashed for its casting and distorting historical facts. Reportedly, the film was made on a huge budget of Rs 200 crore whereas it was unable to recover even half of its budget. by Dr Chandraprakash Dwivedi, the director, recently opened up on what went wrong. Talking to Mukesh Khanna on his YouTube channel, Dwivedi said that even before the release, the audience had picked up on many elements of  _Samrat Prithviraj_ and were criticising it. “They were objecting to how Akshay was looking in the film. One of the objections was about how the actress (Manushi Chillar) was so much younger and Akshay, who was 55 then, was playing the role of a 26-year-old king.” He added, “Then there was a question about his moustache as to why did he not have a real moustache. They even said that the frame of his body was nothing like Prithviraj. Today, honestly, I would like to confess that most of these objections were right.” The filmmaker said that he was “not ashamed” to admit that the team did not fulfil its responsibility towards the audience. “In this film, different people had different roles and responsibilities. I was the weakest of the lot. Had people fulfilled their duties, then this question would not have come up?” He added that after the debacle of Samrat Prithviraj, he and Akshay Kumar have learnt that “no one should tamper with history”.