"Shah Rukh is the boss."
Leonardo DiCaprio is one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, while Shah Rukh Khan has been reigning supreme in the Indian film industry.
Both stars began their careers in the early 1990s, with SRK debuting with Deewana (1992).
A year later, Leonardo’s big break came with This Boy’s Life (1993).
In 2011, when a film purported to star both of them together was announced, tongues naturally started wagging.
The movie was titled Xtreme City and was to be produced by Leonardo’s frequent collaborator, Martin Scorsese.
However, the film unfortunately never came to fruition. Director Paul Schrader revealed why.
Appearing on a podcast, Paul said: “I wanted to do [Xtreme City], yeah.
“I wanted to do that with Shah Rukh Khan and Leonardo DiCaprio. In fact, we all met in Berlin. Scorsese was going to produce it.
“Shah Rukh was in Berlin, and Leo was there. We all met about it. Shah Rukh is the boss. He hires directors.
“Sometimes, he hires multiple directors. He’ll hire somebody for the musical number, and he’ll hire somebody else for the action.
“He’ll hire somebody else for the personal relationship scenes. He can do that.
“He has never really worked under the harness of an auteur, and that, I could see, was starting to grate on him.
“And he had never done a film in the West before, and he had never been a second banana to somebody like Leonardo DiCaprio before.
“Bit-by-bit, I wrote the script. I went to Mumbai several times to see [SRK] and be with him.
“I could feel the ground slowly eroding underneath him.
“So finally his commitment was provisional, and then once his commitment went from ‘firm’ to ‘provisional,’ Leo’s went from ‘firm’ to ‘provisional’.
“Now you have two ‘provisional’ commitments, which means you have no commitment at all.”
Xtreme City was said to revolve around an American who becomes a police officer in New York, while an Indian character is a boss in Mumbai.
Years later, the American is compelled to return to India to seek help from the boss, whose life he had once saved.
However, the officer ends up sucked deeper into an alien world.
Meanwhile, on the work front, SRK was last seen in Dunki (2023).
He will return to voice Mufasa in the upcoming live-action film Mufasa: The Lion King.
The film is scheduled to be released on December 20, 2024.
Leonardo DiCaprio was last seen in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon (2023).
He will next be seen in Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Battle of Baktan Cross, where he will appear alongside Regina Hall and Sean Penn.
The film is due to be released on August 8, 2025.
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