Kal ki stories in demand today

Any conversation about the movies in the past few days would have inevitably led to the mention of Kalki 2898 AD. Nag Ashwin's directorial venture, starring Amitabh Bachchan, Kamal Haasan, Prabhas and Deepika Padukone, has taken the domestic box office by storm as it crossed the R400-crore mark on Wednesday. With it, the film has brought a wave of cheer at the box office that was starved of hits. It has also broken a long-standing myth - that the Indian audience doesn't fancy the science-fiction genre.

Bihar-based exhibitor Vishek Chauhan says viewers are averse to bad films, never to a genre. "Two years ago, it was said that the audience doesn't watch horror films. Two of this year's biggest hits have been in the horror genre [Shaitaan and Munjya]. So, the audience never swore that it wouldn't watch sci-fi films; the thing is filmmakers didn't know how to make them right," he says.

Many believed that the sci-fi genre is favoured by the urban or multiplex audience. With Kalki registering impressive numbers in tier-2 and -3 cities, that myth too is put to rest. Trade analyst Taran Adarsh counters the misguided notion with the example of Avengers: Endgame (2019). Adarsh states, "It made money in mass pockets. Similarly, we desperately needed a film to penetrate single screens, and Kalki has done that successfully."

Rajasthan-based exhibitor Raj Bansal has another interesting observation. He believes the inclusion of Hindu mythology in the narrative appealed to viewers. "They have mixed mythology and sci-fi so beautifully that it has done wonders. The Indian audience is aware of modern technology because of OTT. So, they want to see a good film with perfect VFX," he reasons. Chauhan echoes Bansal's sentiments as he says, "If it was just another world-building exercise without any reference points that the audience could connect to, it would've been a tougher sell in India. Putting the Mahabharata reference grounded the movie."

The impressive collections of Kalki's Hindi version point to another lesson, believes trade analyst Komal Nahata. He notes, "Baahubali 1 [2015] and KGF: Chapter 1 [2018] did limited business in Hindi, but Kalki will surely earn R300-crore-plus in Hindi alone. The Hindi film industry should learn [from this] that nothing matters more than a script. We aren't working hard on our scripts; our films are being made on Excel sheets, where we calculate how we will recover money from different avenues. All this should happen after a film is made. In the south, people make movies, not proposals."

Rs 140 cr
The film's Hindi version has breached this mark