Dear filmmakers, don’t let another Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar happen: Prasad Film Laboratories gives owners 30 days to collect negatives before PERMANENT destruction July 6, 2026 at 12:57PM

Prasad Film Laboratories has issued a public notice in the June 20, 2026 issue of Complete Cinema magazine asking rightful owners to collect film negatives and other celluloid materials lying unclaimed at its premises in Chennai, Trivandrum, Bengaluru and Hyderabad.

According to the notice, the concerned materials must be claimed within 30 days of the date of publication. The company has cautioned that any negatives or celluloid assets left uncollected after the stipulated period may be permanently destroyed in accordance with prevailing pollution-control norms.

The announcement is significant for producers, studios, distributors, financiers and legal heirs who may have deposited original negatives, prints or related film material with the laboratories over the years. Since many older films were preserved primarily on physical stock, failure to retrieve such material could potentially result in the irreversible loss of valuable cinematic assets.

Stakeholders have therefore been advised to verify their records and immediately contact the relevant Prasad Film Laboratories facility if they believe any material belonging to them remains stored there. Ownership documentation and other supporting records may be required before the material is released.

A source told Bollywood Hungama, “Prasad Lab shut down a few years ago. However, they preserved the negatives in their cold storages and charged a rental for it. Now they are doing away with the cold storage facility as well. Hence, it is important that the message reaches the rightful owners in the industry. In the past, negatives of certain films were destroyed. Now, there’s no copy available of those films at all.”

One famous and unfortunate example is the Manoj Bajpayee-Tabu starrer Dil Pe Mat Le Yaar (2000). In an exclusive interview with Bollywood Hungama on the 25th anniversary of the film, in October 2025, Hansal Mehta said, “The film’s negatives are destroyed. My producing partners had sent the negatives to Adlabs. When Adlabs was shutting down, it sent a notice to the producing partners informing them that ‘all the negatives are with us. Claim them within a month. Or else, we’ll destroy them’. They were given a notice of one month. But either nobody received the notice, or they did but didn’t pay heed to it. Eventually, the negatives were destroyed. So, rather than celebrate the film, I am very sad about the development.”

Hansal Mehta continued, “I asked my producers the other day about the negatives. They had no clue and later, they realized that the negatives were destroyed. So, there’s no record of the film.”

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