When Anurag Basu began shooting for his then-untitled film in 2019, rumours were rife that the ensemble drama — featuring Abhishek Bachchan, Rajkummar Rao, Pankaj Tripathi, Aditya Roy Kapur, Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra, among others — was a sequel to his 2007 offering, Life In a Metro. The movie was unofficially referred to as Metro 2 till the filmmaker christened it Ludo last December. The film immediately caught cinephiles' attention, courtesy its quirky title. However, few people know that the name has its roots in Basu's last directorial venture, Jagga Jasoos (2017).

Anurag Basu on the film's set