I cannot tell you the exact cost. But yes, it is an expensive film." The director, however, was extremely unhappy with the hype around the film's budget because he did not want to raise audience expectations. Rajesh Thadani said the film should have been made on a lower budget because the economics of film-making had changed and that restraining a film's budget was "the need of the hour". A distributor told Rediff.com "making such a costly film in the 2000s was not a viable proposition and that audiences had become extremely unpredictable". He added: "Devdas, with all its hype, barely managed to recover its cost. For The Hero to succeed, it will have to do better than Devdas." When The Hero: Love Story of a Spy was in production, the Hindi film industry's revenues were declining, and many were hopeful the film would help to revive the industry. The film's trailers and promos created "enormous" to "positive" buzz in the public and the media, but some trade analysts were skeptical about its high budget and its potential box-office earnings. An editor of Box Office India said the recovery of the cost of a film like this, filmed on "an extra-large canvas", was impossible from the Indian market alone. He said big-budget films like this mostly rely on overseas markets, which was uncertain for this film because it offered nothing new to overseas audiences as a "James Bond type of movie" that had been done several times before. Trade analyst Amod Mehra was more optimistic about the film, saying he hoped it would help revive the Bollywood film industry, which had "virtually gone dead", and that "the public is anticipating something as thrilling and fast-paced as Gadar. If he has kept the pulse of the public in mind, I see no reason why [the film] won't run well." Release As The Hero: Love Story of a Spy was nearing its release, the 2003 Bollywood Producers' strike prevented the release of new Hindi films in theaters after 1 April 2003. Deol was unhappy about the strike because he felt postponing a big film like this was not an affordable option, saying: "When a producer has spent so much money promoting and publicising a film like The Hero, how is he expected to scrap his campaign, postpone his film and start from scratch?" The Hero: Love Story of a Spy was released on