Exhibitors and cinema owners pin hopes on regional releases like Allu Arjun’s ‘Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo’ during the Covid surge – Times of India

With most big releases like Shahid Kapoor’s ‘Jersey’, Prabhas‘ ‘Radhe Shyam’, Ram Charan and Jr NTR’s ‘RRR’, Akshay Kumar’s ‘Prithviraj’, and John Abraham’s ‘Attack’ being postponed due to the on-going Covid surge, theatres across the country are finding it difficult to run their business. Speaking to ETimes, exhibitor and distributor Raj Bansal said, “The theatres don’t really have new content to get audiences into the cinema halls. The problem was there when the government was shutting down cinemas and now cinemas are shutting down for want of software and there are quite a few cinema halls which are closed. The reason is that new releases have been postponed and the old releases have already been consumed by the audiences. Some theatres are not even getting a collection of Rs 2000 from any of the already released movies.”

Another exhibitor and owner of Maratha Mandir and G7 multiplex theatres, Manoj Desai expressed his concerns and said, “I am somehow managing to run the theatre. The audiences have reduced and for how many weeks will people watch ‘Spiderman’, ‘Pushpa’ and ‘83’? So I really don’t know how long will I be able to pull through with my theatre.”

Regional content is likely to fill the void at cinemas with a Hindi dubbed version of Allu Arjun’s film, ‘Ala Vaikunthapurramuloo’ slated to release on January 26 along with the much-anticipated Marathi film ‘Zombivali’. But there are exhibitors who feel that release of regional films is not really going to help them sustain in these turbulent times.

Nitin Datar, from the Cinema Owners and Exhibitirs Association of India, said, “There are a lot of cinemas which have closed due to a lack of content to run on their screens. But at the same time, it is a good time for regional films, which the exhibitors are ready to screen right now. That’s why the exhibitors are now paying the producers a certain percentage from the business of the film.”