Filmmaker Sanjay Gupta made his directorial debut with Sanjay Dutt starrer Aatish: Feel The Fire in 1994, and since then he has maintained a great rapport with the actor. For the record, they have worked together in eight films including the likes of Kaante, Zinda, and Shootout At Lokhandwala. Now, Peepingmoon.com has learned that Sanjay Gupta and Sanjay Dutt are collaborating yet again after 14 years. The director-actor is now teaming up for the sequel of their 2006 neo-noir action-thriller, Zinda.

"Sanjay Gupta has been planning to work with Sanju for quite a while now as their last collaboration was Shootout At Lokhandwala back in 2007. After mulling over several ideas, they've zeroed in on Zinda 2 that they will also jointly produce under their banners White Feature Films and Sanjay Dutt Productions respectively. The sequel, however, will have a completely different storyline and is in no way related to the first part," an industry source informed us adding that the film was earlier supposed to go on floors in September 2021 but has now been postponed to the year-end.

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Sanjay Gupta has apparently also pitched the film to John Abraham to play the second lead alongside Dutt, however, we heard Abraham hasn't given his nod yet. "Things are not clear post the second lockdown. Gupta had earlier approached Abhishek Bachchan but he turned it down, and then he went to John Abraham whose date diaries are packed this whole year. However, the work is in progress and Gupta will set shooting timelines once the second lead is locked," the source further added.

Remembered as Sanjay Gupta's darkest movie ever, Zinda starred Sanjay Dutt, John Abraham, Lara Dutta and Celina Jaitly in the lead, and revolved around a man who's taken and locked up for 14 years without any sane reason is suddenly released, and has four days to figure out why this was done to him. The film is identified as an unauthorized remake of the 2003 South Korean film, Oldboy. Although Sanjay and John were praised for their performance, the film received a mixed response from the critics.

Meanwhile, Sanjay Gupta is expected to shoot the third installment of his Shootout franchise for Ekta Kapoor's banner. As revealed exclusively by Peepingmoon, the new part titled Shootout 3: The Gang Wars of Bombay is based on the 1992 JJ Hospital shootout episode. Sanjay Dutt, on the other hand, has four films lined up for release that includes Ajay Devgn's Bhuj: The Pride of India, Ranbir Kapoor's Shamshera, Akshay Kumar's Prithviraj, and Yash's most-anticipated KGF Chapter 2.