"I can understand SRK fans won't like this."
Shah Rukh Khan is back, in and as Pathaan, the motion poster of which was released amid much anticipation on June 25, 2022.
The actor, who is making his comeback after four years, is seen wielding a shotgun on the poster with his back to the camera and his face being partially visible.
However, while many of his fans were happy to see the poster, some noticed how it had a stark resemblance with the poster of Idris Elba’s Beast.
Shah Rukh Khan and Deepika Padukone’s Pathaan is set to release on January 25, 2023, and its first poster revealing Shah Rukh’s look was released was June 25, 2022.
Idris Elba‘s Beast poster was similarly released much before and the film is set to hit theatres on August 19 this year.
As the debate reached Reddit, many commented on how the two posters were very similar but couldn’t care less, for the sake of Shah Rukh.
Taking his side, a Reddit user said: “It’s a pretty common pose TBH, and I don’t think it’s original for either of these 2 projects.
“YRF should have been smarter though, if recently the Beast one has come out before just modify yours to avoid such issues.”
Another wrote: “Holy cow! It’s a generic poster! Many action movies have the main character in such a pose! There is no single source of copying lol.”
https://twitter.com/kamaalrkhan/status/1540654372291477504?s=20&t=eJrfRXeq6pucY4i0sODMpw
A third commented: “That pose is a little too generic to say this definitively. Maybe they copied but I wouldn’t care.”
Noticing how fans didn’t judge Shah Rukh Khan at all, a Reddit user pointed out that had there would have been a different actor, he would have been massively trolled for the same.
The user wrote: “I didn’t know about this. But now after seeing. It’s a total rip off lol.
“Guns, pose, dressing, colour scheme, font, font style, font graphic, everything is the same.”
“Still Beast poster is better. Pathaan poster looks a bit hazy. I can understand SRK fans won’t like this. But look, had this been not SRK then the defence of “maybe they had a similar vision” would never come.
“Others don’t get that benefit. They are trolled and trashed. SRK might get trolled but won’t affect his movies.”
Pathaan is directed by Siddharth Anand of War fame. The filmmaker also has another much-anticipated film, Fighter, in which Deepika Padukone will be seen opposite Hrithik Roshan for the first time.