New Delhi: Alia Bhatt’s Alpha is facing backlash for copying the introductory scene and dialogue from two movies. The plotline has an uncanny match to the 1990’s French film Le Femme Nikita and a dialogue by Bobby Deol’s character from the film American Sniper released in 2014.
Directed by Shiv Rawail, Alpha stars Bhatt, Sharvari, Bobby Deol and Anil Kapoor. It is scheduled to be released on 3 July.
The trailer of Alpha was released on 10 June, where Alia and Deol’s characters are sitting in a fancy restaurant celebrating her 18th birthday. Deol hands her a box, inside which is a room card where she has to assassinate a person—her first kill. For this, Alia’s character has been trained since childhood. The plot is simple—a girl trained by her father to kill people.
But Le Femme Nikita, released nearly three decades ago, had a somewhat similar premise. While not exactly the same, in Alpha, the father trains her to be a killer, whereas in the French film, the government trains her to become one.
The internet dug up an almost identical scene from the French film, where the characters are sitting in a similar ambience to Alpha. Even the cuts between scenes and the type of shots came out to be similar and ‘inspired.’
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Not a first for Bollywood
Then comes a dialogue by Bobby Deol’s character: “In this world, there are two kinds of people, wolves and sheep. I’m a wolf, what are you?” In Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper, there is a flashback sequence in which Chris Kyle’s father explains to him that there are three types of people in this world—wolves, sheep, and sheepdogs.
Yash Raj Productions has produced Alpha, marking the seventh film in their spy universe after Ek Tha Tiger (2012), Tiger Zinda Hai (2017), Tiger 3 (2023), War (2019), War 2 (2025), and Pathaan (2023).
This is not the first time Bollywood has gotten “too inspired” by movies from around the world. The journey started with Baazigar (1993), starring Shah Rukh Khan, which was ‘inspired’ by A Kiss Before Dying (1991). The storyline is similar in both films: a ruthless man seeking revenge kills the daughter of a businessman. Both stories feature two sisters, one of whom is killed, while the other seeks vengeance against the killer.
Chachi 420 (1997) from Mrs Doubtfire (1993), Murder (2004) from Unfaithful (2002), and Partner (2007) from Hitch (2007), all of these films have similar plotlines, character building and universes to their original counterparts.
(Edited by Saptak Datta)