REVEALED: Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar were originally intended to play cops in Housefull 5; Amitabh Bachchan was offered the role essayed by Nana

One of the biggest multi-starrers of Hindi Cinema, Housefull 5, was released on Friday and has been well-received. This was evident with the hold on Monday. The film has nearly 19 major actors - Akshay Kumar, Abhishek A Bachchan, Riteish Deshmukh, Jacqueline Fernandez, Sonam Bajwa, Nargis Fakhri, Sanjay Dutt, Jackie Shroff, Nana Patekar, Chitrangada Singh, Fardeen Khan, Chunky Pandey, Johnny Lever, Shreyas Talpade, Dino Morea, Ranjeet, Soundarya Sharma, Nikitin Dheer and Akashdeep Sabir. If producer Sajid Nadiadwala had his way, he would have expanded this already sprawling star cast. Bollywood Hungama has learned that two veteran actors, Anil Kapoor and Amitabh Bachchan, were also offered roles in Housefull 5. A source told Bollywood Hungama, “Initially, the plan was to have Anil Kapoor and Nana Patekar play the cops. These roles were ultimately played by Sanjay Dutt and Jackie Shroff. The idea was to have Uday-Majnu kind of banter between Anil and Nana.” The sour...

Madame Web review – Marvel’s junky spin-off is a tangled mess

Dakota Johnson lazily leads an incompetent attempt to set up a new character, made almost incoherent by last-minute changes

It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.

Developed back in 2019, given a green light in 2020, filmed during 2022 and then allegedly undergoing reshoots last year, Madame Web was envisioned as a way to extend Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man universe: a business, if not creative, sense decision after the surprise success of both Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. An elderly clairvoyant known in the comics for assisting Spider-Man is now turned into a young paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who doesn’t even know that Spider-Man exists, in a film desperate to pretend that it’s something it isn’t. Such confusion was on display in the launch of last year’s trailer, immediately going viral for its laughably unsure tone, convoluted plot and checked-out leading lady. Grimly aware of the sea shift, it’s now being referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in press materials with Johnson insisting during press that it’s a standalone movie in its own standalone universe.

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