We have recently reported that veteran actress Sridevi, who played a queen in Vijay’s ‘Puli’, filed a complaint at the Mumbai Producer’s Council alleging that the producers of “Puli” owe her Rs 50 lakh signing amount.
Makers of “Puli” now claimed that Sridevi owes them Rs 20 lakh and they don’t owe her nothing. In a four-page statement, producers of ‘Puli’, Thameens and Selvakumar said that they agreed to pay Rs 2.7 Crore as remuneration along with Rs 30 lakh service tax.
However, Srivedi’s husband Boney Kapoor told the makers that Sridevi would only participate in the shoot if she was paid extra for releasing the film in Hindi and Telugu.
Their statement reads, “We were paying her as per the agreement she had signed at the beginning of the film. However, in the final stages of production, Sridevi’s husband Boney Kapoor asked us to pay her extra as we were planning to release the film in other languages too. After much deliberation, we decided to pay her 20 percent of the film’s Hindi satellite rights, which was Rs.55 lakh, and Rs.15 lakh for the dubbed Telugu version.”
Next, Boney Kapoor convinced the makers to release the film in Hindi saying that Sridevi has good market in Hindi. The makers spent crores just for the publicity. Despite doing so much, the actress didn’t even attend for the film’s Audio launch.
“We had hired three costume designers for ‘Puli’, but Sridevi insisted that we sign Manish Malhotra, and we paid him Rs.50 lakh. She also convinced us to pay Rs.8 lakh for the marketing designer for the film’s Hindi version,” reads the statement.
Makers claim that after all calculations, Sridevi owed them Rs 20 lakh.
