Brand Bollywood looks east

'Wild flight'

Zero, the story of a very short man, was released in India last year but failed at the box office. The film - high on special effects - was screened at the Beijing festival on Saturday after being cut by 30 minutes of its original running time of 164 minutes, according to an industry analyst.

Khan's team and a Chinese company are in talks over the potential of a theatrical release in China.

"I think it was an extremely wild flight to take in a commercial cinema," Khan said during Friday's interview, of critics' response in India to Zero.

The "vertically-challenged hero" alters the typical image associated with his onscreen characters, Khan added.

Zero, he explained, seeks "to show three facets of life, of incompleteness - physical, mental, emotional" and says "let's celebrate it because all of us at any given point in time have one of these things going wrong for us".

Mainstream Hindi cinema tends to celebrate perfection, Khan said. "How nice you look, how cool you are, how many six packs you have, and what fight you do, and what dancing you do, and here is a film which has turned it upside down and taken you on a flight like a fantasy film."

Khan himself has acted in many such movies.

But the India box office is not a barometer for the Chinese audience, as has been previously demonstrated by Hindi film Secret Superstar.