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.