This Diwali is turning out to be a star-studded blockbuster Kollywood fest! The major scheduled Tamil theatrical releases for the festive season currently are Silambarasan’s ‘Maanaadu’, Rajinikanth’s ‘Annaatthe’ and the latest to join the race, the Arya-Vishal starrer ‘Enemy‘, though there is a strong buzz that Vikram’s ‘Mahaan’ is also looking to hit screens during the same time. ‘Maanaadu‘ was the first film to lock a Diwali release, with its extremely intriguing trailer releasing just a few days ago. Directed by Venkat Prabhu, the film is a political thriller that explores the concept of time loop. Rajinikanth starrer ‘Annaatthe’ is an action drama directed by Siva, whereas the third release, ‘Enemy’, helmed by Anand Shankar, features Vishal and Arya in the lead and is touted to be an out-and-out action flick.
With trade analysts predicting and picking their favourites, we thought of doing a comparative analysis for the most anticipated Tamil theatrical films releasing this Diwali. The question is, how does one precisely quantify the buzz surrounding a film just before its release? One way is to observe the total number of views for the film’s official teaser/ trailer released on YouTube. The other parameters could be the number of tweets featuring the film’s hashtag, the number of likes (or dislikes) for the film’s trailer or the number of hits/views a new film single receives in a day. However, since we can consider just one, we have taken into account the total number of teaser/ motion poster views (at the time of writing the article), to compile this list, since the trailer of ‘Annaatthe’ is still not out. They are listed in descending order as below-
1. Enemy
Medium: In Theatres
Running Span- 2.5 months
Total Number of Views: 14.8 Million
Total Number of Likes: 284 K
2. Maanaadu
Medium: In Theatres
Running Span- 8 months
Total Number of Views: 6.5 Million
Total Number of Likes: 314 K
3. Annaatthe
Medium: In Theatres
Running Span- 3 weeks
Total Number of Views: 6.3 Million
Total Number of Likes: 354 K
So, as we can see from the data above, the Arya-Vishal starrer ‘Enemy’ is the clear winner, with Silambarasan’s ‘Maanaadu’ and Rajinikanth’s ‘Annaatthe’ coming in 2nd and 3rd place, respectively. Having said that, it is note-worthy that while the teaser of ‘Maanaadu’ released 8 months ago, both the other movies have managed to garner a huge number of views within a much shorter time frame. Another non shocker is that in a short span of 3 weeks, the ‘Annaatthe’ motion poster has received the maximum number of likes! There is no charmer greater than the Thalaiva himself, eh?
Another big takeaway from this analysis is the fact that theatres may see a boom during the festive time with three highly awaited, big-ticket films releasing together. Only time will tell if they eat into each others’ profits. Regardless, viewers are surely in for a treat with this Diwali theatre bonanza!