Soon after the film’s release, producer Gaurang Doshi had a noisy fall-out with with director Vipul Shah and Akshay Kumar.
A sequel was announced with a new director, Marathi veteran Sachin Pilgaonkar. It never took off.
Aankhen had not just an open ending, but two open endings, one for the Indian market and the other for the overseas audiences. The script writers for the sequel were to take forward the story from any of the two endings.
Sachin Pilgaonkar had some unfortunate experiences as a Hindi film director (he directed the ill fated Prem Deewane with Jackie Shroff, Madhuri Dixit and Pooja Bhatt for Subhash Ghai). Sachin was very excited about doing an Aankhen sequel, and about directing Mr Bachchan. From among the original cast Mr Bachchan and Paresh Rawal were in the cast of the sequel.
Akshay Kumar, Arjun Rampal and Sushmita Sen were not in the sequel though.
Akshay and Gaurang had a massive showdown when the producer refused to arrange bulk passes for Akshay’s family for the pre-release screening of Aankhen. They also had monetary issues. Arjun felt he had got a raw deal when his only romantic song with Sushmita was edited out from Aankhen, and Sushmita openly supported Arjun. While the first Aankhen was based on a play, the sequel was designed to be entirely original. It never happened though.
