Bollywood has spent decades adapting Hollywood plots, but the reverse almost never happens. One exception is Parinda, the 1989 Vidhu Vinod Chopra crime drama that made Nana Patekar a star. Its Hollywood rebuild, Broken Horses, arrived in 2015 with a strong cast and a respected crew—and still slipped into box-office obscurity.
The original that set the template
Parinda is often remembered as one of the first Hindi films to give the underworld a realistic, gritty grammar. Anil Kapoor and Jackie Shroff played brothers caught in the orbit of Anna, the don played by Nana Patekar. The performance won Patekar his first National Film Award.
The film also had a commercial pulse. Tumse Milke, sung by Suresh Wadkar and Asha Bhosle, became a chart hit. On the awards circuit, Parinda collected two National Film Awards and five Filmfare Awards, and it was India’s official selection for the 1990 Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film.
From Mumbai to the American Midwest
The remake idea surfaced in 2012, with Vidhu Vinod Chopra set to adapt his own film for American audiences. Abhijat Joshi co-wrote the screenplay. The result was Broken Horses, shot in the American Midwest with Western-film textures: ranches, cowboys, gunfights and a sweeping score.
The casting looked promising. Vincent D’Onofrio—later Marvel’s Kingpin in Daredevil—took on Julius Hench, the Anna equivalent. Anton Yelchin and Chris Marquette played the brothers. Clint Eastwood’s long-time cinematographer Tom Stern handled the camera, and Oscar-nominated composer John Debney wrote the score. Reliance Entertainment and Fox Star Studios produced and distributed the film.
A stacked team, a quiet collapse
Critics were not kind. The film’s Rotten Tomatoes approval rating sat at 26%, with reviewers leaning on words like “overwrought.” The numbers were harsher:
- Budget: around $15 million
- India gross: under ₹1 crore
- US gross: about $65,000
- Worldwide gross: under $300,000
That made Broken Horses one of the lowest-earning mainstream Hollywood releases of its year. Its 1-hour-41-minute runtime was also considerably shorter than Parinda’s near 2.5 hours, but the trim did not fix the problem.
Why the original still wins
The failure did not weaken Parinda’s place in the canon. Over the decades it has appeared on News18’s list of the 100 greatest Indian films, Mint’s 70 iconic films of Indian cinema, and Filmfare’s 100 Filmfare Days series. Filmmakers including Anurag Kashyap, Nikkhil Advani and Dibakar Banerjee have credited it with shaping their own journeys.
For fans, the lesson is a pleasant one: when Hollywood got its hands on a Hindi classic, it proved how much the original’s specific world—and Nana Patekar’s menacing stillness—actually mattered. Revisiting Parinda remains the better Saturday-night plan.
Source: Hindustan Times