After shattering box office records, the mega-budget Baahubali is speeding towards another milestone – the film will soon clock 50 days in screens. This, as director S S Rajamouli pointed out in a series of tweets, is now an increasingly rare achievement for films. As it hits a half-century not out, Baahubali will ‘not block theatres for false records,’ Mr Rajamouli said.
Mr Rajamouli said that the film will be pulled from those theatres it’s not doing well to make way for other movies.
He tweeted as : “Record number of 50 days, 100 days,175 days are things of past. Today, Films are being released in 1000′s of screens and run is over by 3-4”.
He further tweeted as : “weeks. Few main screens might still give shares, but mostly the run is over. It is very sad when some fans ask for an extension, sometimes”.”paying out of their pockets and sometimes asking the exhibitors to do so. Friends..! what do we gain out of these false records??”.
The decision to keep Baahubali in profit-making theatres and pull it from the others will likely be greeted with relief and joy. The Baahubali juggernaut has already meant that one film at least – Mahesh Babu’s Srimanthudu – was pushed back by several weeks so as not to be cannibalized.
Filmmaker Ram Gopal Varma, usually the earliest of birds, has already applauded Mr Rajamouli he tweeted as :
“You are bang on right..One should look at the final collections ..Thinking of number of weeks and days is prehistoric thinking.”
Baahubali, believed to be India’s most expensive film with a stated budget of Rs 250 crores, is a two-part epic fantasy starring Prabhas, Rana Daggubati, Tamannaah, Anushka Shetty and Ramya Krishnan.
The first part released across 4,000 screens worldwide in Telugu, Tamil, Hindi and Malayalam on July 10 and reportedly collected more than Rs 500 crores in just 24 days. On August 28, the film will have been in cinemas 50 days.
