The 2010 film Raavan starred Abhishek Bachchan, Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, and Vikram in his Hindi debut, and was directed by Mani Ratnam. The Mani Ratnam directorial was a modern-day retelling of Ramayana from the perspective of Ravana. While Vikram's character of the police officer Dev Pratap Sharma was based on Lord Rama, Aishwarya played his wife Ragina Sharma and her character was based on Sita. Abhishek's character of a naxalite named Beera Munda was based on Ravana.
Made in Rs 55 crore, Raavan bombed at the box office and failed to even recover its budget. Its worldwide gross earnings were Rs 49.57 crore, as per Box Office India. Even though the film was a major commercial failure, Abhishek was appreciated for his sincere, honest performance by the audiences and critics. But, he wasn't Mani Ratnam's first choice for the film. The director wanted to cast Shah Rukh Khan as his Ravana.
Shah Rukh, who had previously collaborated with Mani Ratnam in the 1998 romantic drama Dil Se, told Filmfare in 2019, "I enjoyed working with Mani Ratnam. It was fun. He wanted me to do Raavan. But I was caught up then. Also, it was bilingual. I found it difficult to do that."
Raavan was also made simultaneously in Tamil as Raavanan, in which Prithviraj Sukumaran played the cop's role and Vikram, who played the cop in the Hindi film, became the naxalite Veera in the Tamil version. Aishwarya Rai played the same role in both the films. Unlike Raavan, Raavanan was a success at the box office and earned around Rs 85 crore gross worldwide.
In 2023, Mani Ratnam had admitted that making Raavan as a bilingual film was a mistake. Speaking at the Jio MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, the filmmaker had said, "Making Raavan as a bilingual was a mistake. It was a burden because I was literally making two films at a time and neither Hindi nor the Tamil audience could completely relate to it. It was a case of neither here nor there."
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