Today’s Trivia, Big B, Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna were to play the three Musketeers

For fans who didn’t know Amitabh Bachchan, Dharmendra and Vinod Khanna were set to star together in Ramesh Sippy’s film.

In the 1970s it was the time when Amitabh Bachchan and Dharmendra were at the peak of their career. Fans waited overnight in lines to get their movie’s tickets. At that time a director couldn’t hire both actors in a film. It was too costly and the script needed to have screen time for both actors. But it eventually happened with Sholay in 1975, when Ramesh Sippy made that possible. The film went on to break all the records and some of them are even left today to be broken. The huge success of the film gave both the leading actors, actress Hema Malini and villain, Gabbar Singh played by Amjad Khan an achievement of a lifetime.

But the makers and writers of Sholay, Salim Javed were already planning for another film featuring the lead actors. It was to be the remake of the Hollywood film, The Three Musketeers. Sanjeev Kumar was to play the third lead and Big B and Dharmendra also gave the green signal. But destiny wanted something else, Sholay’s shooting was delayed which resulted in the whole plan being ruined. After that Amitabh and Dharmendra became busy in films which they had signed contracts earlier and the film was shelved.

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Later when things became again favourable the makers contacted the actors again. But this time, the third lead was Vinod Khanna. But this time the writers and between the actors and writers lead to halting. The film was eventually released in 1979 as Jigar, which starred, Mithun Chakraborty, Danny Denzongpa and Dharmendra.