MUMBAI — Tips Industries spent the first week of June fighting in two courtrooms for the right to put two 26-year-old songs on screen. The audience, which no judge controls, is now deciding whether they were worth the fight.
“Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai,” the David Dhawan comedy that leans its marketing on recreated versions of “Chunnari Chunnari” and “Ishq Sona Hai” from his 1999 hit “Biwi No 1,” held steady in its first full week, adding about 3.5 crore rupees on Tuesday for a worldwide total that tracker-based reports place near 47 crore. Against a trade-estimated budget of 50 to 55 crore rupees, which Tips has not confirmed, the film is surviving rather than soaring.
The number matters well beyond this release, because those two songs are the subject of one of the largest copyright claims Bollywood has produced. Puja Entertainment, the Vashu Bhagnani banner that produced “Biwi No 1,” has sued Tips Industries, Ramesh and Kumar Taurani and Dhawan himself in the Bombay High Court, seeking 400 crore rupees over the use of the catalogue, news agency ANI reported when the suit was filed in late May.
The film reached theaters on June 5 only because the court let it. Justice Farhan P. Dubash declined Puja’s urgent plea to block the release and the two songs, in an order Live Law reported, noting that the producer had already obtained a status quo order from a civil court in Bihar in early May and that “no satisfactory explanation is also forthcoming” for its delay in unwinding that case before arriving in Mumbai.
The defense framing was blunter. Tips’s lawyers characterized the Bihar detour as forum shopping, pointed out that the song arrangements had been public knowledge since November, and told the court that 1,900 domestic cinemas, 3,000 screens and bookings across more than 70 countries were already committed. Stopping the machine three days before release, they argued, would punish everyone but the lawyers. Tips had earlier dismissed Puja’s allegations publicly as “malicious” and “misconceived.”
Varun Dhawan stars as a wedding photographer opposite Mrunal Thakur and Pooja Hegde, in the actor’s latest collaboration with his father, whose name is on both the new film and the 1999 one at the center of the dispute. The recreations themselves were handled by Javed-Mohsin and Anu Malik, layered into a soundtrack assembled from half a dozen credited composers.
The procedural history has been unusually bitter for a song dispute. Puja first sued in Katihar, Bihar, in late April and secured an ex parte order freezing the status quo around the catalogue on May 6. Tips escalated to the Supreme Court, which stayed that order before the month was out. By the time Puja refiled in Bombay, the calendar had become the real battlefield, and the calendar favored the film.
For Tips, the stakes are corporate as much as creative. The listed company re-entered film distribution with this very title, making “Hai Jawani Toh Ishq Hona Hai” the proof of concept for a vertically integrated model in which it produces, distributes and owns the music. A soft theatrical run weakens that story; an adverse ruling on the songs would strike at the catalogue business underneath it.
The wider industry is watching because recycled music is now structural. Remakes of catalogue hits anchor most major Hindi soundtracks, and the rights chains underneath them, built on decades-old contracts between producers and labels, have rarely been tested at this scale. A 400 crore claim over two songs, whatever its eventual fate, reprices the assumed safety of every recreation deal currently in production.
The box office, meanwhile, is delivering its own verdict in a crowded market. The film is running well behind the pan-India juggernauts of the season, the same front-loaded economics that just handed Ram Charan’s “Peddi” its first single-digit day, though a family comedy at this budget level needs far less to close its books. Trade chatter puts the film’s survival line at a stable second weekend rather than a spectacular one.
What is not yet public is what happened when the parties returned to Justice Dubash’s courtroom on June 8. No order from that hearing had been reported by Tuesday night, and neither side has commented on whether a settlement conversation exists. Tips has also not disclosed the digital and satellite components of the film’s recovery, which for a comedy of this scale often matter more than ticket sales.
So the two proceedings continue in parallel, one measured in crores per day, the other in hearing dates. The songs played in roughly 1,900 cinemas again on Tuesday. What they are worth, and to whom, is still an open question in both rooms.
