Ekta Kapoor's streaming service ALTBalaji issued an apology in light of plagiarism allegations by award-winning filmmaker Sudhanshu Saria. In a Twitter thread, Saria alleged that ALTBalaji had 'blatantly ripped off' the artwork for their show His Storyy from the poster of his film Loev. Deleting the poster from their social media pages, the streaming platform released a statement that read, "The uncanny resemblance and similarity cannot be written off as a mere coincidence. It has been an oversight on part of our design team. For this we apologize."
"We respect the creativity of every designer and would never intentionally lift their work not disregard their talent. Thus, an apology to the artists involved in the making of this poster is warranted," the statement said. They also clarified that they've deleted the poster from all platforms.
"WHY IS THIS INDUSTRY LIKE THIS?," Saria had started his thread, "Woke up to find that our painstakingly illustrated, original poster for @loevfilm has just been blatantly ripped off by the geniuses at @altbalaji @ZEE5Premium for their show #HisStoryy." While he appreciated that ALTBalaji is telling a queer story through the show His Storyy he added, "Am glad they liked our poster; am glad they're telling a queer story but why do this? What is the need? We made our poster with no funds to speak of," questioning why the production house couldn't come up with their own poster.
Loev's poster features the leads lying in bed together and the poster for His Storyy also looks strikingly similar. Saria had also shared both the posters in his tweet.
The statement comes after Indian film director Vikramaditya Motwane also spoke up in support of Saria and took to his Instagram stories to point out the plagiarism.
He also brought up and earlier allegation involving the Judgementall Hai Kya poster and its similarity to Hungarian artist Flora Borsi's work.
His Storyy stars Satyadeep Mishra, Priyamani Raj and Mrinal Dutt and follows the story of a married man discovering his sexuality, and is scheduled to start streaming on 25 April.
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