Mohanlal’s historical epic ‘Marakkar: Arabikadalinte Simham’ (AKA ‘Marakkar: Lion of The Arabian Sea’) has been on hold for a year now, thanks to the ongoing coronavirus situation. This film was expected to launch in 5000 theatres around the world on March 27th 2020, in its original Malayalam language as well as in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Kannada dubbed versions. The film was also planned to release in Arabic and Chinese for 50 countries, making it the largest release for a Malayalam movie. Sadly, it has been put on hold for more than 15 months and it looks like the wait is going to get much longer. ‘Marakkar’s’ film producer, Priyadarshan has had to fight off claims of direct-to-OTT release for months now and recently the director-producer announced that he is willing to wait another 6 months if he has to, to release the movie in theatres.
‘Marakkar’ had a second release date on Eid (13th May 2021), but the film producers decided to push the theatrical release for the film by another couple of months to August 12th 2021. Which was a good thing too, as theatres in Kerala were forced to shut down on 27th April 2021 and a 6 week State-wide lockdown quickly followed the aforementioned shutdown. The lockdown in Kerala is still undergoing, with its removal having been rescheduled over 4 times due to the rising number of Coivd-19 cases within the state. The second wave of the coronavirus has pushed many filmmakers into releasing their films on OTT platforms and many reports have been coming out recently saying that ‘Marakkar: Lion of The Arabian Sea’ will be released directly on OTT.
But ‘Marakkar: Lion of The Arabian Sea’ has a budget of Rupees 100 Crore, making it the most expensive Malayalam film of all time. There was no way Priyadarshan was going to allow the film to release directly on OTTs, especially with a film with that kind of production cost. Of course, there have been talks about the film planning to release on OTT after it finally comes out, similar to the situation of the upcoming Telugu film ‘RRR’ which has a budget more than thrice that is expected to released in theatres on October. ‘RRR’ is expected to release on ZEE5 and Netflix eventually, with the filmmakers making back around half of the film’s production cost with Rupees 200 crore being paid for the streaming rights. So to bring down the huge direct-to-OTT release hype behind ‘Marakkar’, we expect the production house to take the ‘RRR’ route too, soon.
Priyadarshan is willing to wait for the film theatres to open up again for ‘Marakkar’ to premiere. This movie was made with a theatrical release in mind, so its best impact can only be in theatres, according to the Indian director-producer. He said that he is in no rush to release the film and will wait till December or next year, if he has to. And if the number of coronavirus cases continues to rise in Kerala as seen in the past couple of months, we could very well be looking at a December/ next year theatrical premiere situation for ‘Marakkar: Lion of The Arabian S
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