Today’s Mumbai Mirror carried a report which said that Hrithik Roshan’s upcoming movie Kaabil has found itself in a legal soup for plagiarism. So what was the big deal here? Well, it was the people who want to pursue the case that intrigued me. Netflix, the world’s premier streaming network, wants to sue the producers of Kaabil for ripping of their brand superhero series, Daredevil.
I am a huge fan of the superhero series, that completed two seasons on Netflix, but I can for all certainty say that Kaabil is NO Daredevil, apart from the fact that both the heroes are devoid of eyesight. To compare the two would be saying that Salman Khan’s Chulbul Pandey inspired Ryan Reynolds’ Deadpool!
Daredevil is about a vigilante, who is blind in nature (though none of his enemies know about it) but uses his other senses like hearing and smell which are more amplified than that of an ordinary man, to take down enemies. Though his father died thanks to the bad elements when he was a kid, Daredevil’s reasons for taking on the bad guys are more humanitarian than revenge seeking.
Now we have seen the trailer for Kaabil, and it is clear from the promo itself, that the movie is a love story interspersed with a vendetta drama. Hrithik Roshan and Yami Gautam play a blind couple in love, whose marital bliss is ruined by the intrusion of two baddie brothers, played by Ronit and Rohit Roy. When the hero finds his world turned upside down by these two, he goes on a revenge seeking spree against the two, blindness be damned.
From the plot itself, we can see that apart from the heroes being blind, there is no similarity between the movies. And yet the makers of Daredevil felt that the action sequences (not really!) and colour schemes make both the movies similar, and they are going ahead with the legal course (all this from a 2 minute promo). If that can even be considered as the basis of a legal suit, we wonder how these below Indian superhero movies got away (but then again, Kaabil is not a superhero movie).
So if Kaabil can be slapped with a legal suit, why should we go easy on our other Bollywood films ?
Ra.One
Shah Rukh Khan’s pet superhero project was original by its idea, but couldn’t save itself from escaping its Hollywood trappings. The poster itself was a rip-off of Batman Begins that came in 2005, while Ra.One was released in 2011.
Even the H.A.R.T (Hertz Amplifying Resonance Transmitter) Macguffin from Ra.One takes itself inspiration from Iron Man’s chest core, while the action sequences like the car-blasting scenes (X-Men: Last Stand) and the final fight (Tron) also look inspired.
Drona
Abhishek Bachchan’s bland attempt at being a superhero is also not void of Hollywood trappings.
His intro arc about being trapped in a vindictive foster care, before discovering his legacy and leaving his foster family, is so reminiscent of, yes, you guessed it right, Harry Potter.
Mr India
Even our most beloved superhero can trace its inspiration way back to the 1933 movie The Invisible Man (based on the HG Wells’ novella).
However while our Arun Bakshi was a do-gooder who can invisible at will, the protagonist of the Hollywood movie is more anti-hero, and remains mostly invisible.
A Flying Jatt
This is just one of the sequences from Tiger Shroff’s superhero movie of this year, that’s Hollywood inspired. We are not saying anything more on this…
We can say from the trailer at least, that Kaabil has not committed the rip-off crime as these above movies. Hope they settle the case amicably, if there is one!