Anirudh Exits Shah Rukh Khan’s King, Sachin-Jigar Take Over Score

Anirudh Ravichander has exited the music department of Shah Rukh Khan’s King over a scheduling clash, handing the album and background score to Sachin, Jigar. The composer’s theme track stays with the film.

The handover lands while Siddharth Anand’s action project is deep into its production calendar, with principal photography already underway in Mumbai since May 21, 2025. The exit is a partial musical change, not a clean break.

A Composer Swap That Keeps the Signature Cue Intact

Anirudh’s theme survives the transition, and Sachin, Jigar will build the wider score around it. That arrangement preserves the sonic identity already cut into the film’s promotional language while a new team takes on the full album.

The composing duo inherits a project with an unusually heavy musical brief. Anand’s films lean on propulsive, percussion-forward cues, and the score must now carry both the retained theme and a fresh body of material.

Anirudh’s exit follows a demanding run across multiple large-format assignments, a schedule crunch that made the split inevitable rather than acrimonious. His theme remains the connective tissue between the two musical regimes.

Practical Scale and the Anand Action Machine

Anand is orchestrating King as a physical, stunt-forward production rather than a soundstage build. The Mumbai opening shoot ran a 12-hour session with Shah Rukh Khan, Suhana Khan and Saurabh Shukla in front of the camera.

Suhana Khan’s theatrical debut opposite her father is the film’s central commercial hook, a father-daughter pairing that gives the marketing a narrative engine beyond the action. The ensemble around them carries serious weight.

Deepika Padukone, Abhishek Bachchan, Anil Kapoor, Jackie Shroff, Rani Mukerji, Jaideep Ahlawat, Arshad Warsi and Raghav Juyal round out the reported cast. That depth signals a film built to sustain multiple set pieces, not a single-star showcase.

The scale here sits in the same ambitious action territory as contemporary large-canvas action experiments now crowding the Indian release slate.

December 24 and the Holiday Corridor Bet

Red Chillies Entertainment has locked the film for December 24, 2026, with the promotional line reading “#KING is Ready to Roar on 24.12.2026 in Cinemas.” The date plants the film squarely in the Christmas, New Year window.

That corridor delivers extended holiday footfalls across the diaspora, a premium stretch for event cinema. Earlier chatter had pointed to a Gandhi Jayanti slot in October 2026; the December placement is the confirmed position.

For exhibitors, a Christmas-week opener means sustained screen dominance through the school break, with weekday collections holding far better than a standard Friday drop. Distributors get a full two-week runway before the January reset.

The musical transition adds a wrinkle to the post-production timeline, since a new score team must integrate a retained theme into a fresh album under a fixed delivery deadline. Every week of scoring time now carries real cost.

The composer change and the locked holiday date are tracked across our industry release wire as the film moves toward its final marketing push.

The commercial stakes are simple: a Christmas event release for Shah Rukh Khan, a debut vehicle for Suhana Khan, and a score that must land on time. The music handover is a scheduling problem, not a creative retreat.