‘12th Man‘, Mohanlal’s upcoming movie, started shooting last week. This film is expected to be a thriller – which is not a surprise – since ’12th Man’ is a Mohanlal-Jeethu Joseph collaboration. Their last collaboration, if you guys don’t remember, was the brilliant suspense thriller ‘Drishyam 2‘. And according to the director and film producers, they are not afraid to remove the theatrical release of ’12th Man’ and give it a direct-to-OTT release – which would likely be Amazon Prime Video – especially if the coronavirus situation doesn’t improve by the time the film is ready for release.
Jeethu Joseph has already shown that he has no problem in releasing his film directly for streaming, no matter the actor. And Mohanlal has proven that he has the acting chops for both a direct-to-OTT release as well as a theatrical one. We will only know about the Amazon Prime Video situation, though, if the film’s production house decides to release the movie directly for streaming.
This is still a long way away, and we expect the film to complete its shoot and reach the final stages of post-production by the end of October (hopefully). By then, according to medical experts, India will be dealing with 1-1.5 lakh coronavirus cases daily – due to the third wave of the pandemic resulting virus. And this is if the third wave of the coronavirus doesn’t stop the film production midway through its shoot. So a direct-to-OTT premiere for ’12th Man’ is not out of the cards yet.
So many factors are at work here, and we are still, almost definitely, looking at a direct-to-OTT release. We want to watch the movie in theatres – we do miss the cinema halls. But if given the option of waiting a month to watch ’12th Man’ in theatres or watching it now on our mobile device, we know what option we would choose. What about you?