Billa 2 gets A Certificate

Billa 2 gets A certificate and production team denied the cuts that were recommended. The official announcement regarding the 'A' certification will be made after receiving the Certification papers from the Censor Board. The release date of the film is also expected to be announced shortly. Let us analyze the implications...

Profit Impact 

This would automatically preclude Billa-2 from getting 30% tax waiver. On the other hand, this shows the makers confidence on the content and the strong conviction not to compromise on the essential aspects of gangster movie. On the margin side, this will be a sharp impact which Aascar and producers are willing to absorb and that may have been priced-in already in the rights costs.

Revenue Impact

Secondly on the top-line revenue front, the makers are also fine with saying "No" to family audience. One of the prominent big budget "A" movies released in the recent past was Selvaraghavan's "Aayirathil Oruvan" which had similar scale of budget and ended up with a loss for the producer. Based on data points from the past, This is a very risky move since 'A' rated big budget movies have not brought big profits before due to the restricted size of the target market. Female population usually stay away from A certified movies. So, Billa-2 is now purely restricted to a narrow group of student population (age 18 to 25). The impact will be seen as the collections after 2nd week because that's when the family crowd usually enters the theatres. So, this leaves only the first week to bring home the collections. 

Big Promotions needed for release on June 22

Given that it is not a long festival weekend, the promotions and opening need to be bigger than Mankatha. It will be a hasty if Billa-2 decides to go for June 21/22 release. Less than one week is not going to be sufficient for doing the big promotions required to reach beyond core Thala fans. 

Bottomline: Overall this gutsy move is consistent with David Billa's style. This is an encouraging decision for not making creative compromises just to accommodate the absurd tax waiver rule. However, an extremely risky business decision that investors are willing to make. Hope it pays off for the betterment of movie industry.