Karan Johar was not keen to rope in Mike Tyson for Liger

Vijay Deverakonda and Ananya Panday went all out to promote Liger all around the country. However, that didn't seem to be enough to pull the audience to the theatres. The recently released film has crashed miserably at the box office. According to trade reports, Liger is an even bigger disaster than Chiranjeevi and Ram Charan’s film Acharya, which opened with much fanfare on April 29.

The film has incurred heavy losses and someone like a Mike Tyson also could not save the film with his presence. Reportedly, the boxing legend took home a whopping amount of Rs 25 crore. Yes, you heard that right! According to a report in Bollywood Hungama, Mike Tyson has been paid the aforementioned amount for his cameo appearance in Liger which is much higher than Vijay Deverakonda’s full-fledged appearance. A source close to the development revealed to the portal, “Puri had a thing about working with Tyson. Otherwise, today’s audience knows nothing about Tyson. He was fixated on the idea of anyhow getting Tyson into the film, no matter what the cost.” Karan Johar who co-produced the Hindi version of Liger was totally opposed to the idea of inviting Tyson. Vijay Deverakonda too was not kicked by the idea. It was entirely Puri’s idea. “Puri had a thing about working with Tyson. Otherwise today’s audience knows nothing about Tyson. He was fixated on the idea of anyhow getting Tyson into the film, no matter what the cost,” a source close to the project reveals.

Recently, Liger producer Charmme Kaur spoke out about the back-to-back box office failures in Bollywood and how it’s a ‘scary situation’ at the moment. “People have access to better content in one click just by sitting at home. The whole family can watch the biggest budget films on television, and until you don’t really excite them, they aren’t coming to the theatres," Charmme told Free Press Journal. “But, this is not the case in Bollywood. In August, three Telugu films - Bimbisara, Sita Ramam, and Karthikeya 2 - did phenomenally well, which made Rs. 150–170 crores. It happened in the same country. It is difficult to understand since it doesn’t mean people in the South are crazy for films. It is a scary and depressing situation."