Balaji Motion Pictures on Tuesday rubbished suggestions that the release date of the Kangana Ranaut-Rajkummar Rao starrer Mental Hai Kya was deliberately moved to July 26 to stage a clash with Hrithik Roshan’s Super 30.

“The shift in the release date is a decision taken after recommendations from the distributors, trade analysts and a top research team, keeping in mind the other releases a week before and after this date,” read a statement shared by the film’s producers on social media. “We have thus been advised to shift the release of our movie to 26th July, purely for business prospects. We did everything in our purview to ensure the other parties that there will be no mud slinging and it will be a dignified release.”

Ranaut and Roshan had a public tiff in 2016 that involved the stars trading barbs, making personal attacks and issuing legal notices to one another amid murmurs of an affair gone sour.

Directed by Prakash Kovelamudi, Mental Hai Kya has seen its release date changed multiple times. It was initially scheduled to be released on February 22. The date was then changed to March 29. In April, a June 21 release date was announced, which was on Monday pushed to July 26.

Mental Hai Kya has been written by Kanika Dhillon (Manmarziyaan, Kedarnath).

Mental Hai Kya poster.

A Ranaut-Roshan face-off was on the anvil in January. Super 30 was supposed to be out on the 26th of that month, the same date as Ranaut’s Manikarnika: The Queen of Jhansi. However, the release of Roshan’s film was pushed in the wake of sexual harassment allegations against its director, Vikas Bahl. The filmmaker, who has been accused of sexual assault by a former co-worker, was also dropped from the movie’s post-production process. Anurag Kashyap was roped in instead. The film will be released without a director credit.

Produced by Reliance Entertainment, Nadiadwala Grandson Entertainment and Roshan’s HRX Films, the movie is based on mathematician Anand Kumar’s Super 30 programme, which coaches underprivileged students for the Indian Institute of Technology’s entrance examinations. The institute claims to have a high success rate, but in 2018, a group of IIT-Guwahati students filed a public interest litigation against Kumar, accusing him of inflating the numbers of successful candidates and demanding high fees.