Delhi High Court has ordered the Kala Hiran teaser taken down, but it has not stopped the film's release

The widely repeated version is that Salman Khan has gone to court to ban a film about the blackbuck poaching case. The orders on the record show something narrower, and pleaded on a broader legal basis than personality rights alone.

The film is Kala Hiran: The Battle for Legacy, produced by Amit Jani through Jani FireFox Films and directed by Bharat Shrinate. A promotional poster was released on 29 May 2026. Khan's case, as reported by Bar and Bench, is that the film portrays him as having links to the underworld and that the poster is defamatory as well as a violation of his personality rights. That matters, because a defamation claim and a personality rights claim are answered differently: the first can be met by proving truth or fair comment, the second by showing no attribute of the persona was appropriated.

On 12 June 2026 Justice Neena Bansal Krishna of the Delhi High Court issued notice to the film's director and producer, requiring them to respond to Khan's plea. Bollywood Hungama, reporting the same hearing, dated the order 13 June 2026 and named the additional respondents as Jani FireFox Films and casting director Akshay Pandey, with the matter listed for further hearing on 19 June. Khan's counsel told the court the trailer had been launched on 13 June although a 20 June release had earlier been indicated, and relied on an earlier Delhi High Court order of 11 December 2025 protecting his personality rights.

The substantive ruling came on 27 July 2026, from Justice Jyoti Singh. She directed that the teaser be removed from social media within 24 hours, with directions to fall on platforms including X and YouTube if the producer did not comply. Bollywood Hungama reported her as observing that the content could harm the actor's reputation, that such treatment would be unacceptable even if it involved an ordinary citizen, that a reputation takes years to build and can be lost very quickly, and that depicting pending judicial matters could amount to contempt. What she did not do was restrain the film's theatrical release. Only the teaser's online circulation was ordered off.

The defence, put by Jani's counsel, was that the teaser never names Salman Khan, uses no artificial intelligence or deepfake technology, and depicts public events over which no exclusive legal protection exists. That argument goes directly to the boundary the case is really about: whether a persona right can reach a dramatisation of real proceedings in which the person was the accused.

Those proceedings are still live. The Wikipedia account of the case, drawn from contemporaneous reporting, records the alleged hunting of two blackbucks near Jodhpur in September 1998 during the filming of Hum Saath-Saath Hain, a complaint by the Bishnoi community on 2 October 1998, Khan's arrest and bail on 12 October 1998, a first conviction in April 2006, an acquittal by the Rajasthan High Court on 25 July 2016 for insufficient evidence, and a reconviction and five year sentence by a Jodhpur court on 5 April 2018, with bail two days later. Two petitions were transferred to the Rajasthan High Court in March 2022 and the matter remains pending there. Khan's notice to the filmmakers, as summarised by the legal blog IPRMENTLAW, argued the film could "prejudice his right to a fair trial and interfere with the administration of justice". Jani publicly described the notice as "an attempt at intimidation" and said the team would not abandon the project.

The doctrine Justice Singh is applying is the same one she set out at length two months earlier in Varun Dhawan's suit, CS(COMM) 626/2026, decided on 29 May 2026: a celebrity's name, image, voice and likeness are attributes over which the celebrity has exclusive control, and their unauthorised commercial use is actionable. Kala Hiran tests whether that reasoning, built up in cases about counterfeit merchandise, fake booking sites and pornographic deepfakes, extends to a narrative feature about a criminal case.

What has not been decided is the central question. There has been no ruling on whether the film may be made or released, no finding on whether the poster or teaser is in fact defamatory, and no determination of the 11 December 2025 order's scope. Nor is it publicly established whether the film has been submitted for certification. Every order so far has been interim, and the underlying poaching appeal that the film depicts is itself still undecided after 28 years.