Bollywood casting rumours usually follow a pattern. Someone's name shows up, a producer either ignores it or shoots it down two weeks later, everyone forgets, repeat. Race 4 has been stuck in that loop for the better part of a year now, and this week Aamir Khan's name got dropped into the mix. Except this one had a little more meat on it than the others. Trade sources are saying he actually sat through a narration and liked it, which, fine, that's still not the same as signing a contract, but it's more than "a source close to the actor says." Filmfare went a step further and threw Vijay Krishna Acharya's name in as the director he's apparently pushing for.
Worth pausing on that. Acharya directed Aamir in Dhoom 3 back in 2013, and then again in Thugs of Hindostan in 2018 a film that bombed badly enough that a lot of people assumed the partnership was done. Apparently not. If he does end up on Race 4, it'd be new territory for him and for the franchise, which up to now has only ever known Abbas-Mustan, with Remo D'Souza filling in for the third one.
He posted it himself. Not a spokesperson, not a studio PR account, his own Instagram, which tells you something about how quickly this had gotten out of hand. The wording was direct: casting for Race 4 has not been finalized. He asked outlets and fan pages to stop running unverified claims, and the caption underneath basically said the same thing again in slightly different words, that nothing's decided and there'll be an announcement once there's actually something to announce.
He's done this before. In January, almost the identical situation played out over Akshaye Khanna, who'd played the antagonist in the 2008 original and was rumoured to be coming back. Taurani shut that down too, and his reasoning was almost businesslike. Akshaye's story in that world is over, he said. There's nothing left to write for the character. Nostalgia doesn't really factor into it.
Here's what makes all this speculation stick, though — Race has genuinely never behaved like a normal franchise. The 2008 original had Saif Ali Khan, Akshaye Khanna, Bipasha Basu, Katrina Kaif and Anil Kapoor, directed by Abbas-Mustan, and it was built around double-crosses and expensive cars, not characters people got attached to. Race 2 kept exactly two of them, Saif and Anil. By Race 3 in 2018, Salman Khan had the lead, Remo D'Souza was directing instead of Abbas-Mustan, and Saif wasn't in it at all anymore.
Critics tore Race 3 apart, particularly the writing. Didn't matter one bit at the box office. It crossed ₹100 crore in three days and finished somewhere around ₹295 to ₹303 crore worldwide, almost entirely because of Salman's opening-weekend draw rather than anything resembling good reviews.
That's probably the real reason a fourth film keeps generating this much noise even without a locked cast critics can hate it and it'll still make money, so why wouldn't the makers keep going. Some fans are holding out hope Saif comes back for one last round. Most people who actually track this stuff think that's a long shot at this point, mostly because of how much time has passed and how the character would need to be aged up.
Right now, Taurani's statement is the only confirmed piece of this whole thing. Aamir hasn't said anything publicly. His team hasn't confirmed a narration happened, and hasn't denied it either. Acharya's name is out there because of one quote in one report, nothing more solid than that.
Online, obviously, everyone's already picked a side. Some people are genuinely excited about Aamir fronting a franchise built on cons and twists. Others keep bringing up that Acharya's résumé outside Dhoom 3 isn't great Thugs of Hindostan gets mentioned constantly in that argument, and not kindly. A smaller but louder crowd wants Abbas-Mustan back altogether, insisting the franchise lost whatever made it work the moment they left after the second film.
Is any of it going to actually happen? No idea. Taurani's only confirmed that the cast isn't finalized. He hasn't said who's actually being considered, which might be the more interesting question nobody's really asking yet.
Reports this week claimed Aamir Khan had signed on as the new lead of Race 4. Bollywood did what it always does with that kind of news and ran with it anyway. On Monday, producer Ramesh Taurani finally responded on Instagram, saying nothing about the cast is locked in. This is not the first time he's had to say that. Akshaye Khanna, Ranbir Kapoor, Sidharth Malhotra and Tiger Shroff have all been pulled into some version of this same story over the past several months.
