Initially, Tiger Zinda Hai wasn’t supposed to be a sequel to Ek Tha Tiger: Ali Abbas Zafar

Ali Abbas Zafar was speaking at the trailer launch of Tiger Zinda Hai.

Since its announcement last year as the sequel to Ek Tha Tiger, there has been speculation galore if Tiger Zinda Hai would be able to emulate the success of the Salman Khan starrer, but its director Ali Abbas Zafar now reveals that he didn’t write the upcoming film as a continuation to the 2012 superhit.

It was only after he finished the script, he realised Salman and Katrina’s characters from the Kabir Khan film fit in his story.

Ali Abbas Zafar opened up about the film at its trailer launch today. “I had assisted Kabir (Khan). So, I have an elder-younger brother equation with him, same with Salman. But when I wrote this film, it wasn’t like a sequel. I first wrote the story and felt it’s worth telling. I thought since it’s about two agents, and we already had a film about two agents with Salman and Katrina. I’ll merge these two in this story so that it becomes a story of two characters, which people already know,” the director told mediapersons.

The film is based on the true event of 2014 in Iraq when some Indian nurses were taken hostage. Zafar said that though the film’s subject is real, he has tackled it in a fictional space.

“I think the way the cinema is shaping up, we are moving towards realism. We want to tell stories that are real, stories that we have heard. So, when I told both of them about the rescue mission and what happened to those nurses in those days, they got excited. It is a completely fictional account. It’s a fictional film that we have written around that event.”

The film’s trailer is powerful enough for Salman’s fans to forget the horror of his June release, Tubelight. Tiger Zinda Hai looks like Salman’s show all the way as it presents him in the true-blue action avatar, which is loved by the masses. The film releases on December 22.