Rajinikanth’s ‘Coolie’ Film Posters Accused of Plagiarizing Hollywood Films

The new posters for the Lokesh Kanagaraj directorial Coolie have sparked a social media storm, with fans drawing side-by-side comparisons to Hollywood titles and a fan-made poster of Vijay’s ‘Beast’.

August 4, 2025: People are talking a lot about Rajinikanth’s upcoming action drama Coolie online, but not for the reasons that Sun Pictures, the film’s producers, would like. The new promotional posters for the movie have caused a lot of drama on social media, with many people accusing the crew of stealing images from other movies and even a fan-made design.

Side-by-side comparisons uploaded on X (previously Twitter) have shown that Coolie’s posters look a lot like those for Hollywood movies like Madame Web, Glass, and Rebel Moon. One collage said that a poster of Rajinikanth looking through textile folds looked a lot like a fan-made poster for the Vijay-starring movie Beast.

User slammed the makers with, “Nothing is original – we don’t take inspiration – we copied.” A third one wrote, “Had this been a Bollywood film, self-proclaimed critics would’ve torn it apart for blatantly copying these posters.”

The post said that the designer of the poster was bad because “3 out of the 4 posters that the Coolie team just put out are copies of other posters.” I can’t imagine that someone like GP would copy even from a fan-made Beast poster.

This poster issue is the most recent in a long line of problems the movie has had before it came out. Ilaiyaraaja, a famous music composer, had already sent a copyright notice to the people who made the movie for copying his well-known song “Disco Disco” from the 1983 movie Thanga Magan without his permission.

Coolie is directed by Lokesh Kanagaraj and stars Nagarjuna, Sathyaraj, Upendra, Shruti Haasan, and Soubin Shahir. Bollywood icon Aamir Khan makes a guest appearance. Even if there were problems with the movie before it came out, people are still quite excited about it. Fans recently liked the trailer.