Holiday - Why  Hindi Remake of Thuppakki Failed to Fire?

The faithful Hindi remake of Holiday released yesterday to overwhelming negative reviews. This has left the critics and trade very much confused on how a true-to-original blueprint copy of Thuppakki receive such diametrically different response from Hindi audience and critics.

AR Murugadoss had originally scripted it for Akshay Kumar after he delivered his blockbuster Ghajini in 2008. Due to lack of Akshay Kumar's dates, Murugadoss decided to work with Vijay first before remaking it in Hindi. Interestingly, Thuppaki was a script that was originally conceptualized for Hindi audience before adapting to Tamil. 

Vijay's star power not matched by Akshay Kumar

Vijay made the difference to Thuppakki. The fans and critics were willing to ignore all the logical loopholes in the script. Vijay's aura ensured that the movie got a tremendous opening and good word of mouth. The early box office reports of Holiday prove that Akshay Kumar is no match to Vijay when it comes to star power and loyal fan support. In addition, Harris Jayaraj's songs in Thuppakki and Vijay's rendition of "google google" song had a much better reach among Tamil audience prior to the release. 

AR Murugadoss over-simplistic view of terrorism

Fortunately, the vast majority of Tamil people had never witnessed terrorism the way Mumbai or other metro cities have experienced in reality. Terrorism is also  a topic that has been explored by countless film-makers in Hindi. These movies have varying degrees of rawness and commercialism as seen in the movies including "A Wednesday", "New York", "Black Friday", "Kurbaan", etc. Our Hindi audience understanding of terrorism is much more nuanced and in tune with reality compared to what was portrayed by AR Murugadoss in Hindi Thuppakki. Hence, the audience quickly dismissed Akshay's Holiday to be illogical and overtly commercial.

Holiday team is waiting for box office collections on Monday to see if the movie can stand up against all the negative reactions to the Hindi remake of Thuppakki