DAR Spokesperson speaks out on controversy over Nikhil Advani’s D-Day

Recently Nikhil Advani told the media that he was shocked and outraged that a Tamil version of his movie, D-Day was being released with out his permission. The rumors labelled Shruti Hasan as the face of the new movie and the movie would be renamed Dawood, which Nikhil Advani says is misleading because D-Day is a fictional story and not related to Dawood Ibrahim. Nikhil Advani’s statements to the press regarding the irregularities in the Tamil release of the film D-Day are completely misleading, ill-informed, irresponsible and defamatory in nature, according to DAR Motion Pictures.

Being a co-producer of the film and based on the statements from DAR below, it seems Advani and his company were completely aware of not just the distribution deal but also steps already initiated by DAR to rectify the situation. Take a read of the following rebuttal by DAR Motion Pictures to Nikhil Advani’s claims. DAR’s Official spokesperson listed a response to each of Advani’s claims and what actions the company took:

•   D-Day’s distribution MOU for Hindi, Tamil and Telegu languages across India was shared with Nikhil Advani and his company Emmay Entertainment wide email and via multiple conversation (both face-to-face as well as telephonic). There have been no-objects to the said MOU from either Nikhil Advani or his company from then till now
• Telephonic conversation between Nikhil Advani and the DAR team on 29 January 2014 where all these issues were clarified with him and he concurred with the same
• DAR had provided the distributors with the approved creative used in the Hindi campaign of the movie
• As soon as the irregularities were brought to DAR’s notice, DAR immediately addressed the issue with the distributors and worked with them to ensure that all the said inappropriate posters were pulled out of the market and the title of the film restored to the original ‘D-Day’. Nikhil Advani was made aware of the fact that the right channel to address the issue was through the Distributors and that DAR was working with them to resolve the situation. The situation has been resolved as of yesterday
•  Regarding the breach of Artist contract (i.e. Shruti Hassan in this case), DAR is in no way legally obliged to go through any consultation with them as all Artist contracts, especially lead actors, was directly entered into by Nikhil Advani, his company Emmay Entertainment and the said artist. It was thus legally binding and the prerogative of Nikhil Advani and his company Emmay Entertainment to ensure compliance to any actor obligations. It was also imperative that he make DAR aware (in written) of any considerations and/or clauses in such artist agreements that DAR would need to take into consideration while entering any further exploitation agreements. No such communication was received by DAR.

Thus it is evident that this entire public acquisition wide media articles made by Nikhil Advani against DAR Motion Pictures is not just inappropriate, incorrect and misleading but DAR feels it also:

• a) Makes evident Nikhil Advani’s mala fide intentions of maligning DAR’s image in the public
• b) Points towards false allegations made by Nikhil Advani against DAR. Nikhil Advani as per contractual obligations would need to first clarify the facts with DAR and resolve such an issue amicably with us
• c) Has seriously compromised the commercial prospects of the film that has been made and released with large investments

DAR not just deplores this very public outburst by Nikhil Advani but is also in the process of taking legally recourse to this defamatory action and breach of contractual terms by him. What will this mean for the movie D-Day and Nikhil Advani? Keep it locked on Urban Asian for more updates!