Hotel Mumbai
Short description
Hotel Mumbai dramatizes the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, focusing on the siege of the Taj Mahal Palace Hotel. Armed attackers take guests and staff hostage, and the standoff lasts for days before the situation is resolved. Inside, a waiter named Arjun, a chef named Hemant Oberoi, and a handful of guests and employees try to keep those trapped in the building alive while they wait for outside help. The film follows several of these people from different countries and backgrounds as they respond to the unfolding crisis.
Anthony Maras directed and co-wrote the screenplay with John Collee. It was Maras's first feature, followed by Pressure in 2026. The cast includes Dev Patel, Armie Hammer, Nazanin Boniadi, Tilda Cobham-Hervey, Anupam Kher and Jason Isaacs, among roughly fifty credited performers. Made for about 25 million USD, it is an international production involving Australia, the United Kingdom, India, the United States and Singapore.
Hotel Mumbai earned 17 million USD worldwide, less than its budget. Audiences received it well: it holds 7.6/10 on IMDb from some 78,000 votes and 7.5/10 on TMDB from about 1,800 votes. A critics' rating of 6.8/10 from 215 reviews places professional assessments somewhat below the audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The film is based on real events – a series of terrorist attacks in the Indian city of Mumbai from November 26 to 29, 2008.
- Initially, Teresa Palmer was cast for one of the roles in the film, but due to her pregnancy, the actress was forced to leave the project.
- Screenwriter John Collee, and screenwriter and director Anthony Maras, spent a year collecting material about the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks. They met and spoke with survivors of those terrible events, law enforcement officers, hotel guests, and hotel staff. They also spoke with relatives of the deceased – some in person, others by phone or via Skype. They studied intercepted phone conversations between the terrorists and those behind the attacks, read transcripts of court proceedings, and reviewed numerous articles in the print media and hundreds of hours of television news coverage from the scene.
- A significant amount of dialogue in the film is taken verbatim from transcripts of intercepted phone conversations during the 2008 Mumbai event.
- Towards the end of the crime melodrama "Slumdog Millionaire" (Danny Boyle and Loveleen Tandan, 2008), Dev Patel, who played the main character, performs a dance on a railway platform. A month after the release of "Slumdog Millionaire", Patel saw reports on television from the scene of events in Mumbai, and specifically that very platform, and realized he simply had to star in a film about this tragedy.
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