Sidharth Malhotra and Tamannaah Bhatia's forest drama gets a clean U/A 16+ certificate three days before its Friday release.
The Vvaan has cleared the censor board without the board asking for a thing. Not one scene trimmed, not one line of dialogue flagged, not even the routine anti-drug ticker that gets slapped on most Hindi releases these days.
The Central Board of Film Certification handed the makers a clean U/A 16+ certificate on September 22, according to Bollywood Hungama, which reported that its Examining Committee sought neither audio nor visual changes. That alone makes The Vvaan an outlier. Films routinely get asked to add credits in the local language, insert health warnings, or trim a beat here and there. This one apparently gave the board nothing to flag.
The certificate lists the runtime at 136.25 minutes, which works out to 2 hours, 16 minutes and 25 seconds. The film is front-loaded lighter and back-loaded heavier, per the same report: the first half runs 1 hour 4 minutes, the second stretches to 1 hour 12 minutes.
An industry insider told Bollywood Hungama that the smooth clearance tracks with how the film was written. "The makers seem to have told the story they wanted to while keeping the violence and romance in check," the insider said, adding that the dialogue writing likely followed the same restraint, leaving the CBFC little reason to intervene.
The Vvaan marks Sidharth Malhotra's return to theatres after more than a year away, and it's his first film opposite Tamannaah Bhatia. Billed as a forest-set entertainer with family viewing in mind, it's drawn attention for something rarer still in mainstream Hindi cinema: an on-screen Chhath Puja celebration, a festival that gets nowhere near the screen time of a Diwali or a Holi in Bollywood.
The production lineup is stacked. Shobha Kapoor and Ektaa Kapoor's Balaji Telefilms is producing alongside Arunabh Kumar's TVF Motion Pictures and Niraj Kothari's 11:11 Productions, with Deepak Kumar Mishra directing. A song from the film, 'Thummak Thummak', built around the two leads dancing, is already out.
Whether a spotless censor certificate translates into a spotless box office weekend is a separate question entirely. The film opens in cinemas on September 25, right into a Friday that will tell us fairly quickly whether family-friendly and festival-timed is enough to pull audiences in, especially with the current stretch of releases fighting for the same screens.
For now, the only verdict in is the board's, and it's about as clean as verdicts get.
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