Kangana and Shahid were highly paid for Rangoon?

Its not the actors fault... but the directors and the story writer and more than anyone else, the producer!

Film production is an organic process. As such success can't be guaranteed... It depends on lots of vectors, like editing (patch up in the last week before release (very suspect for a film 10 years in the making)), marketing/promotion, acting, of course, script (in this case the new editing has transformed the character development arcs out of sync with the new story line) and of course, the story, which wasn't a evil versus good feel-good-movie, used to work well with India rural audiences...

Also the theme of the story is very unusual and daring. In this case, Miss Julia is Miss India, representing Indian population during WWII tormented by dreams of freedoms (INA and Gandhi freedom fighters) and the needs for its parasitic "benefactor" (the British rule)...
Bollywood didn't see many WWII movies made. And even in the west, the history books about that war don't write even a paragraph about the Indian soldiers involvements in the war (even if they were more than 2 million fighting for the British Empire)...

So in essence, money is nothing when the goal of the movie is to shake the established orders... In this case, Indian past must be remembered..

Originally posted by: -DZ-

PH decided the amount

It must be said that the PH didn't do their homework 😆.It's foolish from the producers to pay exorbitant fees to actors who have a poor box office record.