Likith Shetty and Amrutha Iyengar’s Abbabba trailer to be released on June 9

Kannada filmmaker KM Chaitanya, whose last film was Aatagaara with the late Chiranjeevi Sarja, returns to the comedy genre with his next, Abbabba. The last time Chaitanya dabbled with comedy was almost a decade ago when he made Parari. Abbabba, meanwhile, is Chaitanya’s first collaboration with lead pair Likith Shetty and Amrutha Iyengar, who were, most recently, seen together in the PRK Films production Family Pack. Chaitanya’s film also marks Mollywood actress Ann Augustine’s debut as producer in Sandalwood and was recently announced as a July 1 theatrical release. In the run-up to that, the team will begin its promotional activities with the trailer launch on June 9.

Abbabba, meanwhile, is yet another remake for Chaitanya, who’d made a few with Chiranjeevi (Aatagara, based on the Hindi film Gumnam; Aake, based on the Tamil film Maya; Amma I love you, based on the Tamil film Pichaikkaran and Aadya, based on the Telugu film Kshanam). This time around, the filmmaker finds his source material in the Malayalam film Adi Kapyare Kootamani. The original film had Dhyan Sreenivasan, Namitha Pramod, Mukesh, Aju Varghese, Neeraj Madhav, Roshan Mathew, among others on the cast and music by Shaan Rahman. The Kannada version has Likith Shetty and Amrutha Iyengar in the lead, along with Ajay Raj, Thandav Ram, Dhanraj Achar, Sharath Lohithashwa, Vijay Chendoor and Avinash Yelandur, among others, and music by Deepak Alexander.

The story of Adi Kapyare Kootamani takes place in a college boys hostel, where a girl is smuggled in to meet someone. What happens when the efforts to let her out fail forms the rest of the narrative. The film has been remade in Tamil as Hostel. Also on the list of producers is actor-producer Vijay Babu, who is currently embroiled in a sexual assault case involving an actress from his last film, #Home.