Maddock Films unveiled the Eetha trailer in Mumbai, with Laxman Utekar returning after Chhaava to direct Shraddha Kapoor as a Lavani performer navigating fame and its unraveling.
Maddock Films and Kathputli Creations pulled the curtain off the Eetha trailer at an event in Mumbai on Friday, and the nearly three-minute cut does a lot of ground-covering. It moves Eetha Bai from a childhood steeped in Lavani to the peak of her fame, and then into the part of the story nobody usually bothers filming: what happens when the spotlight starts to drift away.
Shraddha Kapoor plays the title role, and this is clearly meant to be a stretch for her. The film is built around the Lavani tradition, the folk dance-and-song form from Maharashtra that Hindi cinema has mostly used as set dressing rather than subject matter. Dinesh Vijan, who produces under Maddock, said that was exactly the gap he wanted to fill. "What amazed me was that a world so rich in culture, emotion and powerful human stories had remained largely unexplored in Hindi cinema," he said, adding that the women who built the art form deserved more than being remembered only for their performances.
Kapoor herself described getting pulled into the character gradually. "The more Laxman sir told me about the character, the more I felt connected to her world," she said, calling the part an exciting one to take on.
Laxman Utekar directs, which puts him back in theatres barely a stretch after Chhaava did big business earlier this year. He's not repeating himself though. "After the blockbuster success of Chhaava, which became a mega cinematic spectacle, I wanted to take audiences into a completely different world with Eetha," Utekar said, though he pointed out the connective tissue: both films, he said, are built around a central character's extraordinary strength, even if the settings don't overlap at all.
The supporting cast is stacked. Randeep Hooda, Mohammed Zeeshan Ayyub and Siddharth Jadhav all feature in significant roles, and the music comes from Ajay-Atul, whose scores tend to arrive with their own gravitational pull. Early trailer buzz online has leaned heavily on the music and visuals, with some viewers already hoping the film travels beyond India the way Dangal once did. That's a big ask for a Lavani period drama, but it tells you the trailer landed with some force.
Eetha is produced by Vijan and Utekar, and arrives in cinemas on December 4, 2026. That release date puts it into a stretch of the calendar that's getting crowded fast, and whether a story this specific to Maharashtra's folk tradition can pull a pan-India audience is the question the next five weeks of marketing will have to answer. Maddock has bet on niche-but-emotional stories before and made them work. This one asks a bit more of the audience than most.
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