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Kamal Haasan's Vishwaroopam postponed

PUBLISHED DATE : 08/Jan/2013

Kamal Haasan's Vishwaroopam postponed

Kamal Haasan's Vishwaroopam postponed

In a dramatic turn of events, Kamal Haasan’s Vishwaroopam is now postponed to January 25th. The movie was slated for release on January 11th and a DTH premiere was also scheduled across all major DTH operators on January 10th. Right from the beginning, the theatre owners were against Kamal’s move to have a DTH premiere and were threatening to boycott the film. Initial rounds of talk between Kamal Haasan and the theatre owners did not prove fruitful.

 

Reasons for delaying the release

As of yesterday, only 75 screens were booked (mostly small to mid capacity theatres) for Vishwaroopam in Tamil Nadu. Rest of the screens have been taken by Studio Green and Red Giant for their Pongal releases. Also, the DTH premiere sign-ups across all 6 providers were extremely low. The most common reason quoted for low bookings was that Rs.1000/- was too steep for many households. Doing the math across theatrical and DTH sign-ups, one of the estimates show that this could leave behind a severe loss eroding half the investment made on the project.

 

Kamal agrees for a compromise 

To protect the huge investment made on the project, Kamal had to delay the release of his film to January 25th based on the hopes that this would ensure a bigger release. Pongal release screens will free up by then and TNTOA has offered to extend their full support by allocating maximum number of screens if Kamal spaced out the DTH release by at least 5 weeks from the day of release. Hence, the DTH premiere plan is also put on hold as of now since the negotiation is still underway.

 

Since the pendulum has swung back towards the theatre side, DTH providers are not too happy about postponing the release date since all these companies had already spent a lot on advertisements announcing Jan 11th release.

 

Kamal and his team are working on mutually agreeable option between TNTOA, distributors and DTH providers. An official announcement is expected to be made soon. Meanwhile, all major actors and key members within the movie industry got together this morning to find ways to offer their support to Kamal Haasan.

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