Cocktail 2 Songs: ‘Mashooqa’ Released and Fans Are Already Calling It a Plagiarised 1993 Italian Track

There’s something almost poetic about this entire situation. Cocktail 2, a film that literally flew its cast to Italy for a song, brought in a real Italian musician to lend the track cultural authenticity, and built its entire visual identity around Italian aesthetics is today being compared, beat for beat, to a 1993 Italian pop track the team apparently forgot existed.

The song is ‘Mashooqa’. It’s the second release from the Cocktail 2 songs album, a film whose theatrical release date, cast, and promo strategy we broke down earlier. The composer is Pritam. And if you’ve followed Bollywood music long enough, you already know exactly where this is heading.

After a film whose first look was launched inside Dhurandhar 2 preview screenings, has now dropped its second promotional song, ‘Mashooqa’, the internet has pivoted from discussing Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon’s on-screen chemistry to pulling up decades-old European music and running side-by-side comparisons. The Mashooqa Cocktail 2 copied Italian song 2026 debate is already trending and the context makes it sting harder than usual.

What Happened: The Song, the Hype, and Then the Detectives

Maddock Films unveiled ‘Mashooqa’ as a playful, stylish celebration of romance and carefree energy, combining flirtation, dance, and summer-party aesthetics to create a track designed to feel both visually rich and instantly catchy. The song was composed by Pritam, with lyrics by Amitabh Bhattacharya, and voices by Raghav Chaitanya, Mahmood, and Ruaa Kayy with the Italian sections written, co-composed, and performed by Italian artist Mahmood.

The build-up itself had been dramatic. Before the song even dropped publicly, the makers had held an exclusive listening event where attendees were asked to vote between two unreleased tracks, ‘Mashooqa’ featuring Kriti Sanon, and ‘Tujhko’ featuring Rashmika Mandanna. ‘Mashooqa’ won with slightly more votes, which didn’t sit well with Rashmika, who took to Instagram Stories claiming the voting felt ‘rigged’ because media attendees were too busy to vote. Kriti fired back with a thinly-veiled dig: “Mashooqa loves ripe mangoes and not sour grapes…IYKYK.” After which, Rashmika, who has been on a consistent roll across Maddock projects ‘accidentally’ leaked a glimpse of ‘Tujhko’ with a single caption: ‘Oops.’

It was peak Bollywood promo chaos, the fun kind. Fans were entertained, the track was trending, everything was going to plan.

Then someone on the internet pressed play on a 1993 Italian song. And suddenly, ‘Mashooqa’ had a very different kind of attention.

The Comparison That Broke the Party

Short answer to what’s being alleged: internet users are pointing out that the core melodic hook and tonal structure of ‘Mashooqa’ bear a striking resemblance to a 1993 Italian pop track, not vaguely, not as a distant cousin, but close enough that comparison videos have been spreading rapidly since the song’s release.

Here’s the part that makes it genuinely ironic rather than just controversial: the production team didn’t just use Italian visuals as a backdrop, the entire song was shot against the sun-kissed backdrop of Italy, and the Italian sections were penned, co-composed, and performed by Mahmood, a real Italian artist with credibility in the European pop space. The intention was clearly to make the Italian flavour feel organic and earned. And yet, the melody that’s drawing comparisons is to a track from the same country, the same era of Mediterranean pop and nobody in the team apparently flagged it.

Whether that’s carelessness, confidence, or something murkier is the question no one from Maddock Films or Pritam’s camp has answered yet.

Key Highlights

• ‘Mashooqa’ features Shahid Kapoor and Kriti Sanon, and blends youthful energy with Italian influences with Mahmood handling the Italian sections of the track alongside Raghav Chaitanya and Ruaa Kayy. Kriti, coming off her most layered performance yet in Tere Ishk Mein, looks stunning in the ‘Mashooqa’ video, though the plagiarism row risks drowning out her moment entirely.
• Internet users began circulating comparison clips within hours of the song dropping, drawing direct parallels to a 1993 Italian pop track.
• The irony: the song was filmed in Italy and features an Italian co-composer, making the alleged Italian source comparison particularly pointed.
• The Rashmika vs. Kriti mini-Instagram war over the song voting “rigging” has added a separate layer of buzz to the promo cycle, equal parts entertaining and distracting from the actual controversy.
• Neither Pritam, nor Maddock Films, nor the film’s director Homi Adajania have responded to the plagiarism allegations as of today.
• The film’s trailer is set to release on May 29, 2026, with Cocktail 2 hitting cinemas on June 19.

Why Pritam’s Past Makes This So Hard to Dismiss

This is the part of the story that most outlets are glossing over and it’s actually the most important context.

Pritam is not an unknown name in Bollywood plagiarism conversations. A dedicated music plagiarism tracking site documented 52 instances between 2004 and 2010 where Pritam’s compositions were alleged to be lifted or significantly similar to tracks by other composers. where Pritam’s songs were alleged to be lifted, copied, or significantly similar to tracks by other composers, ranging from relatively obscure Arab and South-East Asian artists to bigger names. The tabloids at the time were brutal. Pritam became something of a laughing stock in the industry, and YouTube playlists dedicated solely to juxtaposing his songs with their alleged originals started doing the rounds, earning him the label “the Anu Malik of the new generation.”

He later admitted, in a Rolling Stone India deep-dive, ‘Post all that, I have been very particular’, a statement the internet is now holding him accountable to in real time. and admitted that during his peak years of overwork, the pressure of delivering 19 films a year created conditions where shortcuts happened, whether consciously or not.

That mea culpa, delivered years ago, is now being dusted off by the internet in the context of ‘Mashooqa.’ Because what makes this fresh controversy different from a decade ago isn’t just the song, it’s the setting. Choosing Italy as your backdrop, an Italian artist as your collaborator, and then producing a melody that allegedly echoes a 1993 Italian track isn’t the same as a busy composer cutting corners in a Mumbai studio under deadline pressure. This one’s harder to hand-wave away.

My Take: This Isn’t Just a Melody Problem, It’s a Credibility Problem

Look, I’m going to say what most outlets won’t: the timing of this controversy, coming from a team that so visibly leaned into Italy as both location and cultural identity, feels less like bad luck and more like a blind spot the size of the Colosseum.

Shahid himself said “Mashooqa doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s stylish, playful and just a lot of fun,” and he’s right, it is. The track has energy. The chemistry between him and Kriti is genuinely watchable. But fun and catchy don’t cancel out “suspiciously familiar to a song that predates the film by 33 years.”

What I find most telling is the silence from the production side. When a song is genuinely inspired or interpolated with licensing, teams say so, they list credits, they mention it in press notes, they get ahead of it. When a song is innocently similar due to shared musical lineage, composers usually clarify that too. The silence here is loud. And in 2026, when any 17-year-old with Shazam and a YouTube tab can run a comparison in under three minutes, that silence doesn’t protect you, it indicts you.

Shahid, who has navigated a mixed 2026 with O Romeo’s OTT run after a moderate theatrical reception, needs Cocktail 2 to land clean. A plagiarism cloud over its music doesn’t help. That’s precisely why this pattern, when it reappears, is so frustrating to witness.

What to Expect Next From Cocktail 2

The broader context isn’t great for the film: none of the Cocktail 2 songs released so far have particularly clicked with audiences despite heavy promotional pushes on social media. That means the album isn’t doing the emotional heavy lifting a romantic comedy desperately needs. And now its most visible track is mired in a plagiarism debate rather than a chart-topping run.

For Shahid specifically, who also has Farzi Season 2 building in the background, Cocktail 2 is his biggest theatrical card of 2026. The music campaign needs to turn around. If it lands, if it showcases the film’s actual warmth, chemistry, and story, this controversy will be absorbed into pre-release noise. If it doesn’t, ‘Mashooqa’ will be remembered as the song that told us exactly what kind of film we were walking into.

As for Pritam: the internet doesn’t forget. He once said “post all that, I have been very particular,” and people believed him. If ‘Mashooqa’ turns out to be what the comparison videos suggest, that goodwill takes another hit and this time, there’s no “I was doing 19 films a year” excuse available.

Conclusion

‘Mashooqa’ arrived wanting to be Cocktail 2’s summer anthem – breezy, glamorous, Italy-drenched and impossible to resist. It might still get there. But right now it’s carrying something heavier than a summer vibe: a plagiarism cloud that Pritam’s history makes impossible to simply brush off, and a silence from the makers that’s louder than any hook in the song.

The trailer on May 29 is when this film gets its real shot. Until then, the conversation isn’t about Shahid and Kriti’s chemistry, it’s about a 1993 Italian track that apparently nobody in the production room ever listened to.

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