Sara Ali Khan to debut opposite Hrithik Roshan

The comedy-drama reunites the actor with his Agneepath director Karan Malhotra

Filmmaker Karan Malhotra who started out as an assistant on films like Jodhaa Akbar and My Name Is Khan and made his directorial debut with Agneepath remake, with Hrithik Roshan stepping in for the original Vijay Dinanath Chauhan, Amitabh Bachchan, is set to reunite with his leading man yet again.

The director-actor duo is coming together for a comedy-drama which will mark the acting debut of Saif Ali Khan and Amrita Singh's 24-year-old daughter, Sara Ali Khan.

While the grapevine has been abuzz with speculations surrounding Sara's launch vehicle, the aspiring actress has caught the shutterbugs' eye as a regular fixture at soirees hosted at the Khan residence. In mid-2016, it was reported that she would be launched with a Karan Johar production, but she apparently bowed out of the project following differences between her mum, Amrita and KJo.

"She is back on-board, but with a bigger and better project, after the differences have been ironed out. She will be the leading lady of Karan Malhotra's comedy film, a first-of-it's-kind journey," a source close to the development revealed to Mirror.

While Malhotra's last release was the 2015 action-drama, Brothers, featuring Akshay Kumar, Sidharth Malhotra, Jacqueline Fernandez and Jackie Shroff, the writer-director has been in the news for the last three years for another KJo production, Shuddhi, which first hit headlines in March, 2013. Reportedly an official screen adaptation of Amish Tripathi's bestselling book, Immortals of Meluha, the rights of which KJo had acquired at a whopping fee earlier that year, failed to materialise despite the ambitious scale at which it was planned. While the script didn't shape up as per expectations, the film was also widely written about after several leading men, including Hrithik, Salman Khan and Varun Dhawan, walked out of the project and reports of the makers approaching Kareena Kapoor as well as Deepika Padukone for the female leads surfaced.

While Hrithik released a statement about his decision to walk out of the movie citing scheduling conflicts with Bang Bang in early 2014, other names that were bandied about ranged from Alia Bhatt to Sidharth Malhotra and Parineeti Chopra, before the project was pushed to mid-2014 when Hrithik met with an accident on the sets of Bang Bang and underwent brain surgery soon after.

Meanwhile, KJo took to Twitter to clarify that the film was still in the pipeline."Shuddhi will release on Friday the 25th of December, 2015...the lead cast will be announced shortly," KJo tweeted on February 17, 2014. But finally, in 2016, Karan Johar and Karan Malhotra jointly announced that Shuddhi had been shelved but the duo would definitely announce a new film shortly. "Malhotra and KJo have already worked on another script a highbudget comedy-drama which has been written by Malhotra. Now, with their leading pair on board, they're ready to roll in March 2017," the source concluded.