The Hindu : National : Hollywood studio sues over Bollywood film

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Wednesday, Sep 17, 2008
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National

Hollywood studio sues over Bollywood film

Randeep Ramesh

New Delhi: A Bollywood children’s film, Hari Puttar, has been forced to postpone its premiere after the Hollywood studio behind the Harry Potter blockbusters took the Indian producers to court over the film’s title.

Warner Brothers claims the Bollywood film sounds too similar to the teenage wizard and has refused the Indian studio’s offer of putting a disclaimer in the title sequence. The Harry Potter films have grossed $4.5 billion since 2001.

Hari Puttar was due to open on September 12 but will now only be shown later this month after Indian television networks refused to run promos for the film. A Delhi court is due to hear the case this month.

“The movie will come out on [September] 26,” said a spokesman for the Mumbai studio Mirchi Movies. “We do not know about the exact legal position as of now.”

Hari Puttar: A Comedy of Terrors is a comedy shot in Yorkshire, northern England, about a 10-year-old Indian boy whose family moves to the U.K. and becomes embroiled in a plan to save the world from two criminals. Hari is a popular Indian name and Puttar means “son” in Punjabi.

The next instalment of J.K. Rowling’s franchise, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is not expected to be released until next summer. Warner Bros claims Hari Puttar… infringes its intellectual property rights. This month Ms. Rowling won her claim that a fan violated her copyright with plans to publish a Harry Potter encyclopaedia after a Manhattan judge ruled that the unauthorised guide would cause her irreparable harm as a writer.

Mirchi Movies said Hari Puttar “bears no resemblance to the Hollywood film Harry Potter and it is a completely different story.” Some Indian critics have claimed that the story is strikingly similar to 20th Century Fox’s 1990 film Home Alone, about a child and two inept thieves. However, the London-based director Lucky Singh dismissed the comparisons. “The film that you mentioned neither has songs nor animation [unlike Hari Puttar],” he said.

Bollywood has often taken “inspiration” from foreign movies: last month’s hit Ugly Aur Pagli was a frame-by-frame rendition of the 2001 Korean film My Sassy Girl while The Blair Witch Project was remade in India as Kaal. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008