Samrat Prithviraj box office: Disastrous Akshay Kumar film predicted to finish with Rs 65 crore lifetime on a Rs 200 crore budget

Written and directed by Chandraprakash Dwivedi, the film is based on 12th century Rajpur potentate, the titular Prithviraj Chauhan. Samrat Prithviraj, which takes its story from Chand Bardai’s epic poem Prithviraj Raso, also stars Sanjay Dutt, Sonu Sood, Manav Vij, Ashutosh Rana and Sakshi Tanwar.

Dwivedi had earlier said that Prithviraj has been a long time coming, and that he lived with the story for 18 years before he made the movie.

“Prithviraj is my dream project. It’s a script that I have nurtured for a long, long time because of the extensive research work that was needed before I even attempted to make a film on this mighty and legendary king. To be precise, Prithviraj’s final research took about six months for me to be fully satisfied that every single fact was checked multiple times,” said Dwivedi.

The Indian Express film critic Shubhra Gupta gave the film 2 stars and wrote, “What Chandraprakash Dwivedi has done is to soup up the legend so that it is in sync with the dominant national mood. Prithviraj is representative of a Bharat when it was pristine, pure, unpolluted. How did a director who has also made the astonishingly subversive ‘Mohalla Assi’ achieve this switcheroo? (Dwivedi has been on record to say that this is his passion project, and he has been trying to get it off the ground for a decade and more). Or is it just a question of being expedient?”