Mayank Shekhar (MID-DAY; March 21, 2018)

Insides in the know have told mid-day that Reliance boss Mukesh Ambani, who had only recently invested in entertainment companies Eros and Ekta Kapoor's Balaji, will co-produce superstar Aamir Khan's most ambitious film yet, the Mahabharat series for the big screen.

Whether this marks Ambani’s full-fledged foray into film production with a separate company, or he’ll be involved through his existing media-related entities, Jio, Viacom18 Motion Pictures (where he holds controlling stake), is not known. The source, however, insists on the former, stressing on this being a “one-off” engagement.

Imagined along the lines and scale of Peter Jackson’s Lord Of The Rings trilogy, HBO series Game Of Thrones, Khan’s Mahabharat franchise has already created much buzz in film trade circles owing to rumours flying over a Rs 1,000 crore budget. This, of course, is impossible to ascertain, given the series — likely to comprise anywhere between three to five parts, involving multiple directors — is only at a pre-production/ideation stage. Sources say international writers will be brought in to sharpen Mahabharata’s story-line, to appeal to a global audience.

Late last year, Khan’s planned magnum opus — something he has publicly spoken about as his dream project in the past — came into news, when the actor- producer (currently shooting for the Yash Raj production, Thugs Of Hindostan), had to turn down Mahesh Mathai’s biopic on cosmonaut Rakesh Sharma, to be produced by Siddharth Roy Kapur, owing to the big-ticket series that’s going to singularly keep him busy for the next few years.