As the number of Covid-19 cases continues to rise in Kerala, the State Government has imposed restrictions all over the southern State, with theatres having to shut down by 7:30 pm. This means, no more night shows AKA second shows. This will severely impact the distribution and theatre sector even more immensely, which, unfortunately, they can’t do anything about. With this in mind, the Film Exhibitors United Organisation of Kerala (FEUOK) conducted an online meeting on whether it was worth it to continue to run theatres, during this situation. If this does happen, then the expected clash between Mohanlal’s ‘Marakkar: Lion of the Arabian Sea‘, Fahadh Faasil’s ‘Malik‘ and Nivin Pauly’s ‘Thuramukham‘ will get postponed even further.
After a nine-month hiatus, theatres in Kerala finally opened in January 2021, one of the last few places in the world to finally do so. Kerala, having already experienced a virus outbreak before – in the form of the Nipah virus in 2018. Since then, the entire state has been very vigilant and that’s one of the reasons why it took some time for the outdoor activities to open up around the state. This affected the film industry – the cinema industry in particular due to their late opening. Many production companies were forced to release the movies on OTTs and some which featured megastars were postponed indefinitely.
Even after the theatres opened, many filmmakers still pushed their films to a later date – hoping for the State Government to finally allow theatres to run the night shows, which is where most of these films make a huge chunk of their profits. Because of the slight delay by the government, in announcing the night shows, the production house behind ‘Marakkar: Lion of the Arabian Sea’ decided to push the release date of the War epic by a couple of months.
The theatre owners have slowly started recuperating their losses, thanks to Vijay’s ‘Master’ and Mammootty’s ‘The Priest’, but this new announcement will cripple them again. Since the night shows have been removed indefinitely (again), we expect the previously mentioned three films to change their release dates as well, to attain maximum profit. We can’t fault the production house for their business-mindedness, but this will seriously impact the theatre owners, especially the ones in Kerala who have not had any tax breaks during these past 9 months in lockdown. With the release dates coming real soon (in 20 – 25 days), there is a very real chance that these movies will get postponed. And if that happens, many small-to-medium scale theatres will be forced to shut down.
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