Anya Singh has bagged the female lead in Vikram Bhatt's 1920: Cold Winter, according to a Bollywood Hungama report citing a source close to the production. If it holds, this puts her opposite Ahan Shetty for the second time in one year.

The two last shared the screen in Border 2, this year's war drama that turned into a genuine hit. Ahan played Lt Cdr Mahendra Singh Rawat, Anya his wife Sudha. Now they're swapping the battlefield for a haunted house, or whatever winter horror set Bhatt has cooked up this time.

The source told Bollywood Hungama the makers were drawn to Anya's screen presence and that she's keen to try horror, a genre she hasn't touched in her Hindi film work so far. Anya broke through earlier this year with The Ba***ds Of Bollywood, and this would mark her first stab at a straight-up scare film.

Ahan signed on back in July, a month after Bhatt and producer Anand Pandit announced the project. That announcement itself came on the back of Haunted – Echoes Of The Past, which apparently did well enough at the box office to justify moving fast on the next one.

1920: Cold Winter will be the sixth film to carry the 1920 name, a franchise that's been running since 2008 with wildly mixed fortunes. The original, with Adah Sharma and Rajniesh Duggal, was just about average. 1920: Evil Returns, which brought in Aftab Shivdasani and Tia Bajpai under director Bhushan Patel, did semi-hit business in 2012. 1920 London flopped outright in 2016. Vikram's own directorial return, 1921, with Zareen Khan and Karan Kundrra, was another average grosser in 2018.

The last one, 1920: Horrors Of The Heart in 2023, was the first time Bhatt worked with Anand Pandit, and it did decent enough numbers with Avika Gor and Danish Pandor leading. So this isn't a franchise built on consistency. It's built on Bhatt returning to the same well every few years and finding an audience that shows up anyway.

What's different this time is the casting swap. Pairing two actors fresh off a box office hit together, and asking them to do it again in a completely different genre, is a low-risk bet for Pandit and Bhatt if the Border 2 goodwill carries over even a little.

Neither Anya Singh, Ahan Shetty nor the production have put out an official confirmation yet. Cameras are expected to roll in November, which gives the makers roughly two months to lock the rest of the cast and crew.

Whether 1920: Cold Winter lands closer to Evil Returns or closer to London is the question the franchise has been asking itself for eighteen years now, and it isn't answering it before the shoot even begins.