‘Don 3’ is currently at the centre of a Rs 45 crore dispute, a FWICE ban, and an industry-wide fallout. The franchise has never been messier. Shah Rukh Khan’s version has never looked more untouchable.
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The ‘Don’ franchise is back in the news, and not for a good reason. Ranveer Singh walked out of ‘Don 3’ in December 2025. Excel Entertainment responded by seeking Rs 45 crore in damages, claiming massive financial losses after extensive pre-production had already been completed. The Federation of Western India Cine Employees (FWICE) then issued a non-cooperation directive against Singh, with its four lakh members asked not to work with him.
The chaos around ‘Don 3’ has brought the spotlight back to the franchise itself. And at the centre of that franchise is a question worth asking: what made Shah Rukh Khan’s version of Don so iconic? The answer lies in how he built something Bollywood had rarely seen before, a villain you root for.
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To understand what SRK did with ‘Don’, you need to understand what came before it. The original ‘Don’ (1978) was written by Salim-Javed and starred Amitabh Bachchan. In the original film, Don dies and Vijay, a police insider, impersonates him to infiltrate the gang. Bachchan played both characters, but the film’s moral centre was clear: the impersonation plot kept the audience anchored to a good man in a bad world. Don himself was a device, not the protagonist.
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Farhan Akhtar’s 2006 remake changed that completely.
In the 2006 film, what seems like a similar ending is upended at the last moment. It is revealed that Don never died. Don killed Vijay and pretended to be him in order to reach Vardhan and take over the entire underworld. That single twist rewrote the moral logic of the whole film. The audience had spent nearly three hours sympathising with what they thought was an innocent man. They discover they were rooting for a cold-blooded killer all along.
This was not just a plot device. It was a statement about the character. SRK’s Don is not misunderstood, not tragic, not redeemable. He is fully, consciously evil, and the film wants you to find that thrilling.
Shah Rukh Khan had played morally dark characters before. In 1993, he played a vengeful murderer in ‘Baazigar’ and a stalker in ‘Darr’. ‘Baazigar’ earned him his first Filmfare Award for Best Actor. In ‘Anjaam’ (1994), he won the Filmfare Best Villain Award for playing an obsessive lover.
But after those roles, Khan spent a decade as Bollywood’s primary romantic hero. ‘Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge’, ‘Kuch Kuch Hota Hai’, ‘Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham’; these films turned him into something close to a national symbol of idealised love. By 2006, audiences had been conditioned to see Khan as the man who runs through mustard fields. Don asked them to reset completely.
Farhan Akhtar had originally considered casting Hrithik Roshan in the role before completing the script and changing his mind in favour of Khan. That decision turned out to be crucial. Hrithik would have brought physicality. SRK brought something more unsettling;charm that conceals danger.
The gap between the romantic hero and the criminal mastermind is precisely what made SRK’s Don effective. Audiences came in with a decade’s worth of goodwill toward Khan. The film weaponised that goodwill. Every time Don smiled, you almost believed he was Vijay. That is exactly the point.
Farhan Akhtar himself described Khan’s portrayal as follows: “From Don’s sardonic wit to his cool but menacing fury, Shah Rukh embodied his persona.” The word “embodied” matters here. Khan did not play Don as a performance of villainy. He played him as a man entirely comfortable with who he is. There is no guilt, no internal conflict, no moment where Don questions his choices. That kind of confidence in a villain is rare in Bollywood, where redemption arcs are practically mandatory.
Khan himself spoke about what playing the role felt like: “I really enjoyed it… as an actor it is one of the greatest highs to play a villain’s role.”
The film’s commercial performance confirmed the audience was ready for this kind of protagonist. Made on a budget of Rs 38 crore, ‘Don’ earned Rs 106.34 crore at the box office. It received nine nominations at the 52nd Filmfare Awards, including Best Film and Best Actor for Khan.
Don 2 (2011) went further, collecting Rs 106 crore nett in India and crossing Rs 200 crore worldwide, making it part of SRK’s hat-trick of Rs 200 crore worldwide grossers. Don 2 was also showcased at the Berlin Film Festival. A Bollywood film centred on an unambiguous, unrepentant villain was playing on one of the world’s most prestigious film stages.
In traditional Bollywood anti-hero narratives, the character’s darkness is usually explained and excused. There is a dead parent, a broken childhood, a system that failed him. The audience is asked to understand before they are asked to enjoy. SRK’s Don strips all of that away.
Don is characterised as an extremely selfish, manipulative and unapologetic villain, though he exhibits a little romantic interest in his friend-turned-foe Roma Bhagat. That brief flicker of something human makes him more dangerous, not less. It is just enough to keep you watching, never enough to redeem him.
The phrase “Don ko pakadna mushkil hi nahi, namumkin hai” became one of Bollywood’s most quoted lines. It is not the dialogue of a hero. It is the declaration of someone who has decided the rules do not apply to him, and who has the ability to back that up.
SRK’s Don created a blueprint for a specific kind of Bollywood male lead. Not the man who sacrifices everything for love. Not the man who suffers and then triumphs. A man who operates entirely on his own terms, answers to no one, and considers outsmarting everyone around him to be its own reward.
That blueprint is now at the centre of a real-world drama bigger than any plot twist. The Don 3 dispute, involving a Rs 40 crore compensation demand, production delays, an incomplete script, and eventual FWICE intervention, has shown just how much rides on this franchise. The character of Don carries so much cultural weight that even a casting dispute around the third film becomes national news.
That is the measure of what Shah Rukh Khan built. He took a 1978 entertainer, removed its moral safety net, and turned a criminal mastermind into one of Hindi cinema’s most compelling protagonists. ‘Don 3’ will eventually happen, with someone new in the role. But the version of the character that audiences actually fell for was the one who looked them in the eye, smiled, and lied.
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