Many of you South Indian film lovers should know by now – the first-ever Malayalam superhero film, ‘Minnal Murali’ will premiere on Netflix on Christmas eve. While there haven’t been any big Christmas OTT release announced so far, we could very likely see a megastar film releasing directly for streaming in a couple of months (in time for Christmas). The film in question is the Mohanlal starrer, ’12th Man’ and according to the increasing amount of reports, the film will likely premiere on Amazon Prime Video during Christmas – thereby creating the “Christmas face-off”.
Box office face-offs have been one of the biggest events that many have missed since theatres shut down around the country. While theatres have slowly opened up around the nation, there haven’t been any big clashes on the silver screen. These onscreen clashes always attract crowds and the big theatrical clash between ‘Marakkar’, ‘Thuramukham’ and ‘Malik’ had the Malayali crowd anticipating their theatrical releases. However, the second wave of Covid-19 stopped that from happening with the former two holding off their release dates indefinitely, while the latter was released directly for streaming on Amazon Prime Video.
So after another long break, Kerala theatre owners are expected to space out the new film releases so as to make as much profit as possible. So we will likely not see any more big box office clashes anytime soon, not until the theatre and distribution industries have steadied their ships. Which is a shame.
Still, this does not mean that there will not be a major clash between film premieres – just that the mode of the clashes will change for now, which will be via OTTs. Since Christmas is a huge holiday, many films will be rushing to release during Christmas and we wouldn’t be surprised if 12th Man joins Minnal Murali. There haven’t been any official confirmation yet, but with the way things are going, we wouldn’t be surprised if a promo dropped with a Christmas release date featuring an Amazon Prime watermark.
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