[7] Upon its release, the filmmakers were accused of plagiarising Aarti – The Unknown Love Story, a Marathi film directed by Sarika Mene.

It received seven nominations at the 64th Filmfare Awards including Best Actor (Critics) for Dhawan, Best Supporting Actress for Rao and Best Female Debut for Sandhu.

Dan starts visiting the hospital every day, despite that negatively affecting both his job and his relationship with his friends who still cover his shifts and help him financially.

Seeing Dan's career and personal life drowning due to his devotion towards Shiuli, her mother Vidya decides to make him go and take care of himself.

The idea behind the film was conceived and inspired by newspaper articles and reports about whether comatose people and those with brain injuries hear when we talk to them and the spiritual exercise which brings them back.

[18][19] Varun Dhawan and Rising Sun Films first teased October in a 10-second clip released on 23 January 2018 to their official Twitter and YouTube handles, respectively.

[7] The soundtrack is composed by Shantanu Moitra, Abhishek Arora and Anupam Roy, and features playback singers such as Armaan Malik, Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, Sunidhi Chauhan and Monali Thakur.

[27] Lyrics for "Theher Ja" were written by Abhiruchi Chand, "Tab Bhi Tu" and "Manwaa" by Tanveer Ghazi and "Chal" by Swanand Kirkire.

[29] Rajeev Masand of News18 said that, "October is a thoughtful, meditative film about love, grief, mortality, and the making of a man".

[32] Madhureeta Mukherjee of The Times of India gave the film a rating of 4.5 out of 5 and said that, "It's not a story crafted with heavy doses of dialogues, romantic ballads or bombastic tropes common to the genre.

[33] Sarika Mene, a Marathi filmmaker, had claimed that October plagiarised plot and characters from her 2017 film Aarti: The Unknown Love Story.

[37] She had filed a non-cognisable criminal complaint against makers of October at Vile Parle Police Station, Mumbai.

[37] Hemal Trivedi, also a Marathi filmmaker, who was working with Mene on the Bollywood-remake of Aarti, supported her claim via his facebook post.

[37] In an interview that occurred before the plagiarism accusation, Shoojit Sircar said that all the films that he had directed had been very personal to him and October explores experiences of the hospital life he had lived when his mother was comatose for three months.

[39] Moreover, the film's writer Juhi Chaturvedi also took care of her mother in the hospital for years before she was finally put on ventilator and couldn't be revived.

[8] Despite Sircar's given statements in news interviews on the inspiration behind October, Mene said she won't give up easily and hired a new lawyer for the case because she had requested the makers of October to watch Aarti, to which they didn't respond but to no effect because ScreenWriters Association (SWA) cleared October of all the charges in a letter, dated 20 May 2018, written to Rising Sun Films and Juhi Chaturvedi from Dispute Settlement Committee set up by SWA on 5 May 2018 on the basis of facts that though "... both the films may overlap, the treatment ... is very different ... " and " ... most of the details already existed ... in public domain through news articles and reports about Sunny and Aarti's story".

[40][41] Even after being cleared from all the accusations, on 9 June 2018, Juhi received another legal notice from Mene claiming again that the story of October was plagiarised from Aarti.

The notice demands Sunny Pawar to be credited and monetary compensation for her not being able to make a Hindi adaptation of Aarti, whose rights she had sold to Hemal Trivedi to work on it.