Here's the release date of Shekhar Kapur's What’s Love Got To Do With It

Shekhar Kapur announced that his cross-cultural romantic comedy, What’s Love Got To Do With It, will hit the theatres on January 27 next year.

Following the 2007 drama Elizabeth: The Golden Age, which starred Cate Blanchett, this movie marks Kapur's return to directing a full-length film.

Set between London and South Asia, What’s Love Got To Do With It, features Hollywood star Emma Thompson, Lily James, Shazad Latif and veteran Indian actor Shabana Azmi among others.

The movie is written and produced by Jemima Khan. It also marks Kapur’s first collaboration with Azmi since 1983’s acclaimed Hindi-language family drama Masoom.

“It’s a story of identities,” Kapur told Variety. “It's a comedy about cultural disputes, but it's also about hiding behind identity and how tribes may form out of identities, which in turn can lead to clashes and extremism. Although it's a comedy, the core premise is that people establish identities out of fear of exclusion.”

At the Toronto International Film Festival, there was a screening followed by a Q&A session. Director Kapur has the following to say about his decision to make an atypical rom-com:

The filmmaker was drawn to humanity because of its innate goodness. “And if I could go in and figure out a way to draw out that humanity for myself first, and then fall in love with all of my actors and draw it out of them, and if we could all fall in love while we were filming the movie, what you would see there would not be built. We would all end up being incredibly honest and in love. When everyone on the set is in a circle of love and trust, that is how real emotion operates.”

Writer Khan discusses the origin narrative and her motivation for penning the script. “From the time I was 20 to 30, I spent ten years living in Pakistan. My goal was to create a piece that would celebrate everything Pakistani and serve as a sort of love letter to my country, Pakistan.”

Lily James, who we most recently saw in the TV series Pam & Tommy, says, “I got the script in lockdown and I immediately fell in love with it. It made me laugh. It celebrates love and family. It’s an exploration of that in all different ways. Also, working with Shazad (Star Trek: Discovery, Falling for Figaro) was amazing. He’s one of my oldest, greatest friends.”

It was not the first time they worked together. They co-starred in the BBC miniseries The Pursuit of Love, in 2021.